EASTERN 

NIGHTS- 

A ND FLIGHT S 

ALAN BOTT 




Class, 

GojpgtaN? . 



CXffiMRIGHT DEPOSIT 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 




ALIAS FRITZ RICHTER 

Photograph of Captain Alan Bott, taken in Constantinople while he 
was a prisoner. Captain Bott signed it in the name of "Fritz Richter, 
First Lieutenant in the German Flying Corps." While escaping, he 
was able, by means of the false signature, to convince a Turkish gend- 
arme that he was a German officer wearing mufti. 



EASTERN NIGHTS 
—AND FLIGHTS 

A Record of Oriental Adventure 

BY 

CAPTAIN ALAN BOTT 




GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
1919 



31 b If 

Xs"E>k 



COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF 

TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, 

INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 



]EC-l 1919 

©CI.A536744 



TO 

D. O. V. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Prologue. Through the Looking Glass 3 

CHAPTER 

I. Pain, Purgatory, and a Plan 13 

II. The Flight That Failed 27 

III. Nazareth; and the Christian Charity of a Jew 39 

IV. Damascus; and the Second Failure. ... 64 
V. The Berlin-Bagdad Railway; and the Aero- 
planes That Never Flew 90 

VI. Cuthbert, Alfonso, and a Mud Village. . . no 

VII. In the Shadow of the Black Rock .... 124 

VIII. Constantinople; and How to Become Mad . 140 
IX. Introducing Theodore the Greek, John Willie 
the Bosnian, and David Lloyd George's 

Second Cousin 159 

X. The Third and Fourth Failures 175 

XI. A Greek Waitress, a German Beerhouse, a 

Turkish Policeman, and a Russian Ship. . 189 

XII. The Face at the Window 203 

XIII. A Shipload of Rogues 213 

XIV. The City of Disguises 230 

XV. Stowaways, Inc 250 

XVI. A Russian Interlude 266 

XVII. Sofia, Salonika, and So to Bed . . . . . 281 
Epilogue. A Damascus Postscript; and Some Words 
on the Knights of Araby, A Crusader in 
Shorts, a Very Noble Ladye, and Some 

Happy Endings 286 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
Alias Fritz Richter Frontispiece 



FACING PAGE 



Captain T. W. White x 150 

Captain Yeats-Brown 23 6 > 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 



Eastern Nights — and Flights 

PROLOGUE 

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS 

Most of us who were at close grips with the Great 
War will remember the habit of speculation about life 
on the far side of the front. Somewhere beyond the 
frontier of trenches, we realized, were our opposite 
numbers — infantrymen, gunners, aviators, staff officers, 
mess orderlies, generals, captains, lance-corporals — each 
according to character, rank, and duties, and to the 
position he occupied by reason of ability, courage, ini- 
tiative, old age, self-advertisement, or wire-pulling. 
We saw them through a glass, darkly — a glass that, 
being partly concave, partly convex, and almost im- 
penetrable throughout, showed us our opposite numbers 
as distorted reflections of ourselves. 

We knew well that a journey through, round, or over 
this glass would take us into an unnatural world where 
we should be negative instead of positive, passive in- 
stead of active, useless scrap-iron instead of working 
parts of a well-constructed machine. Yet we never 
considered the possibility of being obliged, in that un- 
real world, to live a life of impotence. Our com- 
panions, now, might have the bad luck to be dragged 



4 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

there; but our sense of normality would not let us reckon 
with such an unusual happening in our own case. 

And then, perhaps, one fine day or night found us 
isolated in an attack, or shot down in an air fight; and 
we would be in the topsy-turvy country of captivity. 
Some of us, who passed into this country from the cu- 
rious East, tumbled head over heels upon adventures 
fantastic as those of any imaginative explorer of the 
wonderland Through the Looking Glass of fancy. 

We were a small band of six scout pilots, one monkey- 
mascot, and a team of Baby Nieuports, hangared in a 
large meadow that was the nearest aerodrome to the 
then front in Palestine. 

Slightly to the south was the one-time German colony 
of Sorona, with houses empty but for ugly furniture 
and ornaments, left behind when the routed Turco- 
Germans scurried up the coast-line after Allenby's 
victory at Gaza. A few miles north was the trench- 
line, a few miles west were row upon row of sand-dunes, 
a sea of that intense blue which is the secret of the Syrian 
coast, and the ancient port of Jaffa, misnamed "The 
Beautiful." 

The particular task of our detached flight of Nieu- 
pdrts was always to be ready, between dawn and sun- 
rise, to leap into the air at a moment's notice and climb 
toward whatever enemy aircraft were signalled as ap- 
proaching from the north. Usually we flew in pairs, for 
the work was of the tip-and-run variety, and needed, 
above all things, speed in leaving the ground and speed 
in climbing; and a larger party would have been slower, 
because of the exigencies of formation flying. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 5 

"A A A four H. A. flying S. toward Mulebbis 10,000 
feet A A A," would be telephoned by an anti-aircraft 
battery. The bell (made out of a Le Rhone cylinder) 
would clang, the "standing by" pilots would fasten 
caps and goggles as they raced to their buses, the me- 
chanics would swing the propellers into position as the 
pilots climbed into the cockpits, the engines would 
swell from a murmur to a roar; and, three minutes 
after the sentinel-operator had scribbled the warning, 
two Nieuports would be away across the sun-browned 
grass and up into the cool air. A climbing turn, at 
about 100 feet, and they would streak upward, at an 
angle of 45 degrees, to the air country above Mulebbis. 
And the next two pilots on the waiting list would come 
within easy reach of their flying kit. 

Even with the fast-climbing Nieuport it was difficult 
indeed to reach a height of 10,000 to 12,000 feet in time 
to get to grips with machines which were at that height 
while we were reading month-old newspapers on solid 
earth. But practice and cooperation with anti-aircraft 
gunners, by means of directional shots, enabled us to 
find the black-crossed trespassers often enough to inocu- 
late them with a wholesome fear of venturing any dis- 
tance beyond the lines. 

At the period of which I write — March to May, 1918 — 
it was not too much to say that enemy machines in 
Palestine, even when in superior force, never fought 
our Bristol Fighters, S. E. 5's, or Nieuports, unless there 
was no chance of keeping at a safe distance. Once, 
three of us were able to chase five German scouts and 
one two-seater for twenty miles over enemy country 
until they reached their hangars at Jenin, out-dived us 



6 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

because of their heavier weight, and landed without the 
least pretence of showing fight; while we relieved our 
feelings by looping the loop over their aerodrome. 

Those were pleasant days, in pleasant surroundings. 
Our tents were pitched in an orange grove, which pro- 
vided shade from the midday sun, privacy from the 
midnight pilfering of Bedouins, and loveliness at all 
times. The fruit had just ripened, and by stretching 
an arm outside the tent-flap, one could pick full-blooded 
giant oranges. Passing troops bought at the rate of 
five a penny the best Jaffas, stolen from our enclosure 
by young imps of Arabs. 

In the heat of afternoon the four of us who were not 
waiting for the next call would mooch through the 
orange-trees for a siesta; and in the cool of evening 
we would drive to the sands for a moonlight bathe in the 
Mediterranean. For the rest, one could always visit 
Jaffa, where were some friendly nurses, and a Syrian 
barber who could cut hair quite decently. Apart from 
these attractions, however, and the mud hovel that 
may or may not have been the house of Simon the 
Tanner, Jaffa was just like any other town in the 
Palestine zone of occupation, with its haphazard 
medley of Arabs, Jews, and Syrians, all bent on getting 
rich quick by exploiting that highly exploitable person, 
the British soldier. 

On the evening before my capture I bathed in the 
company of a German cadet; a circumstance which I 
thought unusually novel, not foreseeing that my next 
bathe would also be in the company of a German, 
although under very different conditions. 

One Offizierstellvertreter Willi Hampel had been shot 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 7 

down and captured, and was in the prisoners' compound 
at Ludd. It was decided that before forwarding Ham- 
pel to Egypt, the best way to milk him of information 
would be for another aviator to discuss aeronautics 
on a basis of common interest; and I was detailed for the 
duty. This rather went against the grain; but Willi 
knew neither French nor English, and I was the only 
pilot in the brigade who could speak German, so that 
there was no alternative. From his cage I motored 
Willi to lunch in our mess, showed him our machines 
and our monkey, and even took him to tea with an 
agreeable compatriot, a beautiful German Jewess who 
was the landlady of some houses at Ramleh. 

The information he let slip was not very illuminating 
— a few truthful statements about machines, pilots, and 
aerodromes, and a great many obvious lies. But his 
opinions on our aviators and machines were interesting. 
Our pilots were splendid, but too reckless, he thought. 
As for the machines, the Bristol Fighter was the work 
of the devil, and to be avoided at all costs; the R.E.8 
might safely be attacked unless it were well protected; 
the British single-seaters were good; but the German 
Flying Corps regarded the B. E. types as sehr komisch. 

As Willi was well-behaved and occasionally informa- 
tive, and as he had been a flying contemporary of mine 
on the Western front in 1916 and 1917, I took him for 
a sea-bathe before he went back to his cage, while 
taking the precaution to swim closely behind him. 

Next day the heat was intense, so that I was glad in- 
deed when the arrival of an A.E.G. from the north gave 
me the chance to climb to the cool levels of 8,000 to 
10,000 feet, flying hatless and in shirt-sleeves. The tres* 



8 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

passing two-seater spotted us, and retired before we 
could reach its height. 

But the next turn of my flying partner and me, in the 
late afternoon, brought us the good fortune of sending 
a Hun bus to earth — from sheer fright and not out of 
control, unfortunately — in open country. I was well 
content on landing, for the atmosphere was cooler 
and almost pleasant, and my day's work should have 
been done. 

But a pony, a monkey, and mischance conspired to 
send me beyond the lines for the third time that day, 
and the last time for many months. Instead of leaving 
the aerodrome at once I remained to play with Bohita, 
the marmoset mascot. Ten minutes later the bell 
clanged a warning. One of the waiting pilots raced to 
his machine, and was away; but the other, mounted on 
an energetic little pony, was chasing a polo ball. The 
pony, being jerked backward suddenly, reared up and 
threw its rider. Seeing that he must be hurt, or at 
any rate shaken, I climbed into his machine and sent 
word that I would replace him, so that no time 
should be wasted. It was then about one hour before 
sunset. 

The first Nieuport had a good start, but the pilot 
was new to the game, and failed to see the white puffs 
from directional shots fired by the nearest A.A. battery. 
The last I saw of his bus was as it climbed due east, 
with the apparent intention of sniffing at a harmless 
R.E.8. to see if it were a Hun, and without noticing 
when I continually switch-backed my machine fore and 
aft, as a signal that a real Hun was near. I therefore 
left what should have been my companion craft to its 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 9 

own amusement, and climbed toward the British anti- 
aircraft bursts. 

At about 9,000 feet I reached their level, and picked 
up the intruder — a gray-planed two-seater of the latest 
Rumpler type. When I was still some 800 yards dis- 
tant its pilot swerved round, and, holding down his 
machine's nose for extra speed, raced back northward 
rather than be forced to fight. I streaked after it, be- 
yond the trenches. 

Now the Rumpler was faster than my Nieuport, but 
was slower on the climb. My only chance of catching 
up, therefore, was first to gain height and then to lose 
it again in a slanting dive, with engine on, in the direc- 
tion of the Boche; and to repeat the tactics. Although 
each dive brought me a little closer, this method was 
a slow business. I remember passing Kilkilieh and 
seeing Shechem, and still being outside machine-gun 
range of the black-crossed bus ahead. 

It was at a spot west of Shechem, and about twenty 
miles from the lines, that I got my chance. By then 
we had nosed down to 6,000 feet. Being able to ma- 
noeuvre twice as quickly as the big two-seater, the little 
Nieuport was soon in a " blind-spot" position, and I 
could attack from a sideways direction, opening fire 
at 80 yards. The Rumpler dived almost vertically 
out of the way, and I overshot. 

I was turning again, when from above came a succes- 
sion of raps — tatatatatat, tatatat, tatatatatat — the unmis- 
takable tap-tapping of aerial machine-gun fire. I 
looked up, and saw three scouts dropping toward me 
from a cloud-bank. 

Swerving right round on an Immelman turn I man- 



io EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

aged to get underneath the nearest scout as it flattened 
out. I had just pulled down my top-plane Lewis gun, 
and was preparing to fire a long burst upward into the 
belly of the scout, when — poop /—my petrol tank 
opened with a dull thud. The observer in the Rumpler 
had fired from a distance of more than 300 yards (far 
outside what is the normally effective range for aerial 
fighting), and some of his bullets had ripped through 
my tank — the only circumstance which, at that mo- 
ment, could have put my Nieuport out of action. The 
petrol gushed over my trousers, and swirled round the 
floor of the cockpit. 

I turned south, and was ready to make a last-hope 
effort to reach the trenches before all the fuel had dis- 
appeared, when I received a second shock. On looking 
over the side, I was horrified to find that underneath the 
tank the fuselage was black and smouldering. Next 
instant some wicked-looking sparks merged into a 
little flame, licking and twisting across the centre of 
the fuselage. 

A thrill of fear that was so intense as to be almost 
physical went through me as I switched off, banked the 
bus over to the left as far as the joystick would allow, 
and, holding up its nose with opposite rudder, went 
down in a vertical side-slip— the only possible chance 
of getting to earth before the machine really caught fire. 

The traditional "whole of my past life" certainly did 
not flash before me; but I was conscious of an intense 
bitterness against fate for allowing this to happen one 
week before I was to have returned to Cairo the Neu- 
tral, where they dined and cocktailed, and where the 
local staff officers filled the dances arranged for the 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS n 

poor dear lonely young officers on leave from the front. 
And I shouted blasphemies into the unhearing air. 

I have no hesitation in saying that I was exquisitely 
afraid as the Nieuport slid downward at a great speed, 
for of all deaths that of roasting in an aeroplane, while 
waiting for it to break up, has always seemed to me the 
least attractive. But the gods were kind, for by the 
time I reached a height of 500 feet the violent rush of 
air — which incidentally boxed my ear painfully — had 
overwhelmed the flame and swept it out of existence. 
The fuselage still smouldered, however, and after right- 
ing the bus (now completely emptied of petrol) I lost 
no time in looking out for a landing-place. 

This was a hopeless task. Below was rocky moun- 
tainside, contoured unevenly, and possessing neither level 
nor open spaces, and scarcely any vegetation. There 
was just one patch of grass, about fifteen yards long; and 
although this was much too small for a landing-ground, I 
chose it in preference to bouldered slopes or stony gorges. 

After pancaking down to the fringe of the brown 
grass the Nieuport ran uphill. It was heading for a 
tree trunk, when I ruddered strongly to avoid a colli- 
sion, swerved aside, and — crash ! crack ! splinter ! — 
banged into the face of a great rock. Of what came 
next all I remember is a jarring shock, an uncontrolled 
dive forward against which instinct protested in vain, 
an awful sick feeling that lasted a couple of seconds, 
and the beginnings of what would have been a colossal 
headache if unconsciousness had not brought relief. 

Consciousness returned dimly and gradually. First 
of all I saw the rock on which my head was lolling; but 



12 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

I had no sense of unity, nor could I feel any bodily 
sensations except an oppressive want of breath. I 
twisted my neck and looked up at the sky, and some- 
how realized that the sun must have set. Then I 
noticed, quite impersonally, that a band of ragged 
Arabs were climbing toward me. Most of them carried 
rifles, and all had pistols or knives protruding from their 
sashes and ammunition belts. The foremost had un- 
sheathed a long blade, which he fingered appraisingly 
as he advanced at a quick walk. 



CHAPTER I 

PAIN, PURGATORY, AND A PLAN 

As my senses became clearer the feeling of oppression 
in my chest grew more and more acute, and I had to 
struggle desperately for breath. 

Yet I failed to realize that I was directly concerned 
in the Arabs' intentions and actions, and looked at the 
motley group from the detached point of view of a film 
spectator. They were an unkempt group, with ragged 
robes and dirty headdresses and straggling beards and 
unfriendly eyes — the sort of nomads who, during the 
lawless days of war would, and did, cheerfully kill 
travellers for the sake of a pair of boots, a dress, or a 
rifle. They had between them a strange variety of 
arms — guns of every size and shape, belts of close- 
packed ammunition, revolvers and bone-handled pistols, 
and curved knives. 

And the foremost Arab continued to advance, while 
fingering the drawn blade of his knife. He was only a 
few yards distant when another and older man stopped 
him with a shout. The man with the shining blade 
answered heatedly. A general argument followed, in 
which most of his companions took part. 

At that time my knowledge of Arabic was of the 
slightest, and in any case I was not in a condition to 
grasp the meaning of their words. Yet instinct and 

13 



i 4 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

deductions from their pantomime made me certain that 
they were debating a rather debateable point, namely 
— whether somebody should be killed and stripped, or 
merely stripped, or whether it would be more worth 
while to hand him over alive to the Turks, in return 
for baksheesh. 

And again I did not regard myself as interested in the 
deliberations, nor was I the least bit afraid, being still 
under the spell of cinematographic detachment. When 
the Arabs' argument was settled beyond question by the 
sudden appearance, on a near-by slope, of a detachment 
of Turkish soldiers, I regarded the scene much as if it 
had portrayed a film sheriff, with comic sheepskin- 
booted posse, riding to rescue the kidnapped maiden 
from the brigands. 

The dozen Arabs stood sullenly aside as four mounted 
officers arrived, followed by a body of running soldiers. 

"Anglais?" said a young officer as he dismounted. 

And the mental effort of asking myself if I were Eng- 
lish brought back most of my senses and understanding, 
and I discovered that I was intensely uncomfortable. 
The struggle for breath was almost insupportable, a sear- 
ing pain permeated my right thigh, my head felt as if it 
were disintegrating. I tried to move, but an implacable 
weight held firmly everything but my head, one arm, and 
one leg. "Anglais?" repeated the young officer. I 
tried to speak, but failed, and could only nod, miserably. 

The soldiers got to work behind me; and first the 
weight on my chest, then that on my thigh, lifted. Two 
officers helped me to rise, and one of them felt my face. 

"Not so bad. I am a doctor. I will bandage it," he 
said, in French. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 15 

I searched to find what was not so bad, and dis- 
covered that all this while I had been seeing through 
the right eye only, for the left was screwed up tightly, 
with a swollen forehead overhanging it. When the 
doctor let go my arm to fetch some dressing from his 
horse, I collapsed, because one thigh would not perform 
its work. 

I fell among pieces of the most completely wrecked 
aeroplane I have ever seen. After hitting the rock the 
machine had evidently crashed to starboard, so that I 
was thrown sideways over the top plane. The star- 
board wings were matchwood, the struts on the port 
side had snapped, and the fuselage was twisted into a 
wide curve, a corner of the rock having cut through one 
longeron and bent another. None of the main parts — 
planes, fuselage, centre-section, rudder, or elevator — 
was whole, and all were intermingled with bits of wire, 
splinters of wood, and tattered fabric. As for the en- 
gine, it had fallen clean out, and was partly buried in 
earth. It was the engine that had weighed so pain- 
fully on my right thigh, while the forward end of the 
fuselage pinned down my chest. 

I thought of burning these remains by throwing a 
lighted match among them suddenly, but refrained, 
firstly because I had no match, and secondly, because 
there was nothing worth the burning. The soldiers 
had already taken the instruments from the dashboard; 
and one of them, I noticed, had broken off* the joy- 
stick for a souvenir. 

The doctor bound up my face and helped me to 
mount a mule, and we left the Arabs to their scowls of 
disappointment at being cheated out of loot. All this 



16 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

while I had been exceptionally well treated by the offi- 
cers in Turkish uniform. Not one had spoken roughly, 
nothing was taken from me, and even my pockets were 
not searched. Could it be that the Turks treated their 
prisoners well instead of badly? Even on the British 
side of the lines we heard stories of how Turkish soldiers 
had killed British wounded, how Turkish officers had 
threatened newly taken prisoners with death if they 
did not give up all they possessed, and how everybody's 
money and most people's boots were stolen immediately 
they were captured; although we did not hear anything 
like the damnable truth of the Turks' atrocities. The 
mystery soon explained itself. 

" Est-ce-que les Anglais viendront bientot?" said the 
young officer who had first spoken. 

"Quisait?" 

"Moi, je Vesper e bien, parce que je suis Armenien. 
Nous sommes tous des Anglais ou des Arabes" 

I had been lucky enough to fall among Arabs and 
Armenians, whose officers were, one and all, pro-British. 
They were a labour unit, explained the young Armen- 
ian, and their work was to make roads and tracks across 
the hill-country. Like all the conscript Armenians, 
Greeks, and Jews, and most of the Arabs, they had not 
been sent to the fighting front because most of them 
would have deserted to the British at the first oppor- 
tunity. The doctor who had dressed my face was a Jew. 
The commandant, whom I would meet at the camp, 
was an Arab, and had an intense love for the British. 
But he would not dare pretend to show too much friend- 
liness, because some of the men acted as spies for the 
Turks. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 17 

The camp sprawled in a hollow between two hills 
without any semblance of order. The men were squat- 
ting at their evening meal, in little parties, each man 
dipping his fingers into the large bowl in the centre of 
his group. The Arab commandant, a fat man with a 
good-humoured face, was in front of his tent, awaiting 
our arrival. 

He looked at me with grave curiosity on learning that 
I was English, and, through an interpreter, greeted 
me ceremoniously. He was sorry indeed, he said, for 
my misfortune, and he hoped my hurts were not seri- 
ous. He had little enough hospitality to offer, but it 
would be a privilege to make me as comfortable as pos- 
sible. Would I honour the officers by joining them at 
dinner? 

Over a meal of soup, bread, rice, and raisins, I was 
asked guardedly about my views on the duration of the 
war, the conditions of life in that part of Palestine oc- 
cupied by the British, and, above all, if the British 
would advance soon. Every one seemed to take it for 
granted that the British could advance when and where 
they liked. I explained that the Arabs, Syrians, and 
Jews were very contented and on good terms with our 
troops; that bread, fish, and meat were cheap and plenti- 
ful; that local inhabitants were well paid for every- 
thing they sold to the British armies; that the popula- 
tion was overjoyed at being freed from the Turks. 

Several eyes gleamed, and most of the company 
looked thoughtful; but no comments were passed. 
Those present looked at each other with side-glances, 
as if distrustful and afraid to speak. 

But afterward, when we went outside the tent to 



18 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

drink our coffee by moonlight, the commandant took me 
aside and unburdened himself while pretending to watch 
the Jewish doctor rebandage my face. Was it true, he 
asked (the Jew acting as interpreter), that the British 
intended to give Arabia and part of Syria to the Arabs ? 

"Most certainly,'' I replied. 

Was it true that the British were friendly to the 
Arabs, and gave their Arab prisoners all sorts of privi- 
leges not given to the Turkish prisoners ? 

"Most certainly." 

The good-humoured face of the commandant grew 
hard as he began talking of the Turks' misdeeds. They 
had massacred many of the Syrian and Arab notables. 
They had starved to death scores of thousands. They 
had commandeered all the crops. They had thrown 
many hundreds into prison, and left them there without 
trial. The whole of the population hated the Turks, 
and were only waiting for a British victory to rise up 
and kill the grasping officials. When the British ad- 
vanced they would receive such a welcome as conquerors 
had never before received in Syria. 

With that he began to tell me how, after he had been 
taken for service from his native town of Horns, the 
Turks told him that if he deserted their lives would be 
forfeit. By merely talking to me he would be suspect. 
Would I be kind enough to give him my word of honour 
not to try to escape while in his charge? If, however, 
I were sent to Damascus and thought of escaping from 
there, I might obtain help from an Arab whose address 
he would give me. 

As I could not walk five yards, and still felt deadly 
sick, I gave the parole readily enough. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 19 

The young Armenian helped me across to his tent, 
and put me to bed. He then wrapped himself in a 
blanket and lay on the floor, facing the entrance; for, 
he said, if I were left to sleep alone the men would creep 
into the tent, to steal my clothes and boots. 

At about two o'clock in the morning, after a few 
hours of fitful sleep, I was awakened and asked to dress. 
A German staff officer, said the Armenian, had ridden 
over to see that I was sent away, fearing that the Arabs 
and Armenians might help me to escape. 

Outside, in the moonlight, I found a young, eye- 
glassed lieutenant — correct, aloof, and immaculate. 
In atrocious French he asked if I were badly shaken, 
and if I thought I could ride for three hours. I did 
not think I could ride for three hours. He was sorry, 
but I really must ride for three hours. Why, then, 
had he troubled to ask my opinion if I could ride for 
three hours ? He made no reply, but I heard him giving 
instructions to the Sanitatsunteroffizier, who had come 
with him, to have me put on a mule and to ride behind, 
while a guide led the way to Army Group Headquar- 
ters. 

A shambling, decrepit mule was commandeered; 
and, with many a groan, I was helped on to its back. 
The Sanitatsunteroffizier mounted his pony, drew his 
revolver, and cocked it with an ostentatious click. An 
Arab guide took hold of my mule's reins. I said good- 
bye to the Arab and Armenian officers, and we moved 
off down a straggling track. The commandant had 
had no chance to give me the address of his friend in 
Damascus. 

About fifty yards ahead I saw what looked like a 



20 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Bedouin, galloping across a stretch of grass and disap- 
pearing behind a mound. And then, from the camp 
behind us, came a startled and furious shout: " Mein 
Pferd! Teufel! Wo ist mein PferdP " The Sanitats- 
unteroffizier motioned our guide to turn round, and 
we retraced our path. The young staff officer — no 
longer correct, aloof, and immaculate, and with eye- 
glass dangling unheeded in front of his tunic — was in a 
loud-voiced rage. He had told "one of these brutes," 
said he to the Sanitatsunteromzier, to hold his horse, 
and he now found that both the horse and the brute had 
disappeared. 

I remembered the Bedouin whom I had seen riding 
across the patch of grass, and was infinitely amused. 
It appeared that the man who held the horse had al- 
ready deserted twice and been recaptured. For his 
third attempt, who could blame him for taking as com- 
panion a German officer's horse, since Allah had sent 
such a wonderful gift ? 

And the young German raged and cursed and shouted 
verbal contempt for all these Asiatic "cattle," among 
whom it was his misfortune to live. Finally, after 
promising the commandant all sorts of penalties, he 
said he would take the best horse from the Arab offi- 
cers' stable. 

The Sanitatsunteromzier and I again walked our 
mules along the narrow track. It was a ride that will 
live always vividly in my memory. The guide dragged 
my mule up impossible slopes, pulled it over slippery 
rocks that ended in an almost vertical drop of several 
feet, and beat it unmercifully on the several occasions 
when it fell forward on to its knees. Each small jolt 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 21 

sent an exquisite pain through my contused thigh, and 
my head felt as if it were being beaten by hammers. 
Everything seemed unreal. The piles of heaped-up 
stones, so common in this country of nomad Arabs, 
looked like monstrous gargoyles in the half-light of the 
moon. 

After about an hour I became light-headed again, 
forgot I was a prisoner, forgot I was on muleback, and 
almost forgot that I existed. I lost consciousness of 
everything but the light of the moon, which appeared 
as a great white hanging sheet, from the other side of 
which sounded, far away and unnatural, the voice of the 
Unteroffizier, like the trickling of hidden water. Fi- 
nally I fainted, and must have fallen from the mule, for 
when I recovered consciousness my head and arms were 
sore, and the German was arranging my bandages. 

Refreshed by a short drink of water, I was once more 
pushed on to the mule's back, and continued the purga- 
torial journey over the rocky hillside. It was four 
hours after we had started when the Unteroffizier an- 
nounced that a village in a small valley some quarter 
of a mile ahead was Arsun, the site of Group Head- 
quarters. 

I was taken to the officers' mess, where I found the 
eye-glassed young officer relating to two early risers — a 
colonel and a major — how the dirty pig-dog of an Arab 
had stolen his best horse. The colonel received me 
kindly enough; but a major, to whom I took an instant 
dislike, looked at my torn clothes and swollen face and 
laughed. 

The colonel gave me wine, and offered his sympathy. 
He fought, he said, side by side with the British in the 



22 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Boxer War, and he had the greatest regard for the Eng- 
lish infantryman. Finding that I had flown in the bat- 
tle of the Somme, he launched into reminiscences of 
that epic struggle, and told me how desperately hard 
put were the Germans not to let their retreat degene- 
rate into a rout. Now, however (this was the period 
of Hindenburg's whirlwind advance toward Amiens), 
things were better. He believed that Hindenburg, 
having bled the French white, would bring about a Ger- 
man peace by the coming autumn. I remarked that 
the French were by no means bled white, and, moreover, 
that there were plenty of Englishmen and Americans 
in the world. Here the major interposed with a sneer — 

"American! All through the war the Allies have 
clutched at straws and men of straw. First it was the 
Russians, then the blockade, then the British, and now 
that all these three have failed it is the Americans! I 
know the Americans well. They are all talk, bluff, and 
self-interest. They will make not the least difference 
to German invincibility." 

And he began a long, boastful account of how he had 
outwitted the Americans and the English. In August, 
1 914, he said, he was on special duty in Japan. He 
slipped across to America, and for a time worked in the 
United States with Boy-Ed and Von Papen. After- 
ward, with Dutch papers, he shipped to Holland. When 
the boat was held up by a British cruiser, he convinced 
the stupid examining officer that he was a Dutchman. 

The major proceeded to draw offensive comparisons 
between the Germans and the English. The German 
nation was magnificently organized, whereas the Brit- 
ish leaders could scarcely be more stupid. But it was 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 23 

not only a question of organization. From every point 
of view the German was superior to the Englishman. 
He was braver, more intelligent, more obedient, and 
had a higher sense of honour. When it was a question 
of equal conditions the German invariably beat the 
Englishman. He turned to the colonel, and, speaking 
in German, pointed out as a proof of his contentions 
that I myself had been shot down by a German. Also 
speaking in German, which appeared to surprise the 
major, I mentioned that I had been fighting with not 
one but four German machines after a German pilot 
had run away over twenty miles of his own territory, 
that the German aviators on the Palestine front in- 
variably fled from the British unless in greatly superior 
force, that the proportion of machines shot down in 
Palestine was about five Germans to one British, and, 
moreover, that when a German officer had the misfor- 
tune to be captured he was treated as a gentleman, and 
was not made a target for uncivil taunts. 

The major rang the bell, and ordered me to be taken 
to a tent by the cookhouse. 

Once more I lay down. This time I was allowed to 
sleep until awakened by the myriads of flies that 
swarmed round the cookhouse while lunch was being 
prepared. I hung about the tent, miserably and de- 
jectedly, for two hours. Then a lieutenant arrived 
and announced that the major would be graciously 
pleased to accept an apology for my lack of respect. 

If, I replied, the major would express his regrets for 
having spoken offensively of the English, I would be 
delighted to exchange apologies with him. The lieu- 
tenant and I treated each other to punctilious salutes, 



24 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

and he withdrew; and that was the last I heard of the 
ill-mannered major. 

In the afternoon, after receiving some bread and cof- 
fee, I was sent away on ponyback, with a German caval- 
ryman as escort. This trooper was friendly and gar- 
rulous. He pronounced himself a Social Democrat 
and an Internationalist. He was a good German, he 
claimed, and had fought for Germany since 1914; but 
he had neither hatred nor contempt for Germany's 
enemies. It was the Ministers, the politicians, the pro- 
fessors, the journalists, and the general staffs who had 
manufactured hatred. The German civilians and non- 
combatant troops were blinded by racial feeling; but, 
according to my Social Democrat guard, not so the 
fighting man. He liked and respected many of his 
officers, especially the colonel whom I had met; but 
after the war the proletariat would see that they, and 
the class they represented, discarded their arrogance 
and ascendancy. And, either ignorant or unmindful 
of Germany's crimes, this half-baked idealist looked 
forward with confidence to a wonderful peace that 
would send him back to his trade of printing, and would 
bring about an immediate heart-to-heart reconciliation 
of Germany and the rest of the world. 

With such debating-society talk I was distracted from 
the dull ache in my thigh and the spasmodic pains that 
came with every jolt from the pony. The heat was 
intense on my uncovered head, and the flies collected 
in their hundreds each time we halted to- allow a party 
of ragged Arabs, mounted on camels or donkeys, to 
pass round some bend of the track ahead of us. 

The country was fairly level, however, and it was 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 25 

not long before we reached my next stage — a field 
hospital corresponding approximately to the British 
casualty clearing station. There my face and thigh 
were dressed, and for the first time since capture I 
could indulge in the glorious luxury of a wash. The 
doctor in charge complained that the hospital had been 
machine gunned by a British aeroplane, but he seemed 
surprised when I told him that the red crescent 
painted on the side of the building could not be seen 
by an aviator. He agreed to mark a large red cres- 
cent on the ground. 

My destination, it appeared, was the Austrian hos- 
pital at Tul-Keran, whither I was forwarded by motor- 
ambulance, with several wounded Turks. It proved 
to be a dirty, insanitary building, such as the British 
would scarcely have used as a billet; but at all events it 
provided a much-needed place of rest. 

Most ex-prisoners will agree that the interval when 
they were first left alone for any length of time was a 
first-class substitute for purgatory. All at once the 
realization of being cut off and under most galling re- 
straint becomes vivid and intense. The thought of 
irrevocable separation from one's fighting companions, 
and of what they must now be doing, leaves one utterly 
miserable and dejected. 

Fifteen miles to the south our Nieuports would be 
waiting for the next tip-and-run call to flight. It 
would, perhaps, be the turn of Daddy and the Babe, 
who were waiting around the hangars, while the rest 
trooped across to tea in the orange grove. Soon all of 
them would be driving along the wired-over, sandy 
road to the coast. And here was I, herded with un- 



26 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

clean Turks in a crowded, unclean room, while the hot 
sun streamed through the window and made one glad 
to get protection from it by hiding under an unclean 
blanket. 

Only fifteen miles to the south. And the coast was 
fifteen miles to the west. The coast? Why, a friend 
of mine, after he was forced to land in the sea, had 
effected a marvellous escape by hiding among the sand- 
dunes during the daytime, and during the night al- 
ternately swimming, walking, and rolling through the 
shallow water on the fringe of the sands, until he had 
passed the Turkish trench-line. Only fifteen miles; 
and from aerial observation I knew that the country 
between Tul-Keran and the sea was more or less flat. 

I resolved that when my leg allowed me to walk, I 
would somehow leave the hospital early one night, 
try to reach the shore before dawn, hide during the 
following day, and then run or swim to the British out- 
posts. 



CHAPTER II 

THE FLIGHT THAT FAILED 

Tul-Keran hospital was altogether beastly. After 
my head had been shaved until it looked like a door- 
knob, I was taken to a sheetless, dirty-blanketed bed, 
in an overcrowded ward that reeked of unwashed flesh. 
The beds were so close that one had to climb into them 
from the foot. 

On my right was a Syrian doctor with a smashed 
leg; and on my left, not two feet away, was a young 
Turkish officer with aggravated syphilis, who groaned 
and complained all day long. When not in pain he 
read pamphlets, which had been distributed to all the 
patients, explaining just how England had shamefully 
attacked the peace-loving Turks and Germans without 
warning. 

The two windows were both broken, and through 
them the scorching sun of Samaria poured all day long. 
Tul-Keran, being in low-lying country, is infested 
throughout the hot summer by legions of flies. In 
the hospital they settled in swarms on beds, faces, 
food, hands, and arms, and flew at random from one 
diseased patient to another. At night they gave place 
to hordes of mosquitoes, which pounced upon and bit 
every particle of a man's body left exposed. The 
sole relief, by day or by night, was to hide one's head 

27 



28 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

under the filthy blankets; and then the closeness and 
the reek made one gasp for breath. 

But worst of all was my intense agony of mind. As I 
lay in bed, I thought of my squadron going through its 
daily round a few miles southwest of me; of my last air 
fight, and whether I might not have avoided capture 
by adopting different tactics; of what the sinister word 
" missing" would convey to various people in England 
and France; of whether I was destined to spend months 
or years in captivity; and of the general beastliness of 
everything. Above all, I railed, uselessly and illogi- 
cally, against Fate. 

The Austrian Staff in the hospital offered whatever 
kindnesses they could, and treated me rather better 
than they treated the Turks. Each morning the doctor 
brought the Vienna Reichspost, and, after a passing 
glance at my distorted features (I was known as "the 
Englishman with the face"), stayed to chat for several 
minutes. He was charming and decorative, with his 
light blue uniform, his curled moustache, and his medals; 
but I never once saw him give medical attention to 
patients beyond ordering medicine or saying invariably 
that each man was progressing wonderfully well. 

A good-hearted but race-proud Austrian priest often 
stopped by my bedside for a friendly argument. He 
performed several services for me, such as changing 
Egyptian notes almost at their full value, instead of at 
the ruinous rate of exchange offered by Turkish banks 
and traders. 

He was, however, a rabid hater in one connection — 
he could find no words bad enough for the Czechs and 
other subject-races of Austria-Hungary. To him it 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 29 

seemed a crime that they should be discontented with 
the suppression of racial sentiments and institutions, 
and should agitate for self-expression. 

"They must either be loyal to us or cease to exist," 
he said. 

Once I mentioned inadvertently that I had met 
Masaryk in London and admired him; and that was 
the end of my friendly relations with this otherwise 
kind-hearted padre, who afterward was polite but dis- 
tant. 

One morning there came a German officer, very tall, 
very correct, and wearing the badge of an observer in 
the German Flying Corps. He clicked his heels, bowed 
from the waist upward, and inquired: "Hauptmann 
Bott?" 

I admitted to the name and rank, whereupon the 
visitor introduced himself as Oberleutnant Wolff, the 
man whose shots had punctured my petrol tank and 
brought my machine down in the mountains. 

Having apologized for the state of my face, he offered 
to drop over some British aerodrome a letter announc- 
ing that I was alive and would like some clothes. In 
accordance with the polite relations between British 
and German aviators in Palestine, I was visited by 
several other flying officers, each of whom — out of 
pure kindness of heart as I thought — made the same 
suggestion. 

When I had written the note, and addressed it to 
"British Air Force, Palestine," I was told that it could 
not be sent unless I addressed it by name to my late 
squadron commander, giving the number of the 
squadron and the situation of the aerodrome — all of 



3 o EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

which would have been highly useful information. I 
refused to write such an address, and said I would do 
without my kit. 

The stipulation must have been a bluff, however, for 
Oberleutnant Wolff finally took the original letter, 
and dropped it upon the British aerodrome at Ramleh, 
which was well known to them. 

Every few days British aeroplanes flew low over 
Tul-Keran, and bombed either the railway station or 
local encampments. When this happened Turks and 
Arabs would scurry from the road while the anti-air- 
craft guns were firing, and all our orderlies would dis- 
appear until the bombardment had ended. Soon after 
Oberleutnant Wolff's last visit an aeroplane, instead of 
making for the railway, hovered above a large meadow 
used as a landing ground, and dropped what must have 
looked like an enormous bomb. It whirled down 
slowly, by reason of long streamers attached to the head 
of it. It did not explode, and the aeroplane left with- 
out troubling Tul-Keran any further. 

The "bomb" was a sack containing kit for myself and 
Major Evans (captured three weeks earlier) which a 
British pilot had risked his neck to bring. A German 
Unteroffizier opened it before me. He searched nearly 
everything — boots, underclothes, and trousers, and act- 
ually ripped open the lining of a tunic in a hunt for 
hidden papers. But what he did not find, and I did, 
was a tiny slip of tissue, sewn into the corner of a col- 
lar, with this message scribbled on it: "Dear Bottle — 
so glad you're alive. Never say die. Dine with me 
at the Savoy when we meet after the war. The Babe." 

Six months later (before the end of the war), when I 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 31 

had escaped from Turkey, I did dine with "The Babe"; 
but at Floca's, in Salonika, and not the Savoy. 

The kit was very welcome, for I had been flying in my 
shirt-sleeves when shot down; but still more welcome 
was the knowledge that people at home would know 
that I lived. With this worry removed I now had a 
clearer mind for preparing an escape. Moreover, my 
leg was feeling stronger every day, so that I hoped to 
make the attempt soon. 

While thinking over my plan one morning I was inter- 
rupted by a soft-spoken sentence in French from the 
Syrian doctor with the smashed leg: 

"M. le Capitaine, both of us would like to be away 
from these Turks." 

At the time I did not know to what a state of revolt 
the Syrians had been brought by misery and oppres- 
sion; and in any case it seemed unwise to let a stranger 
know that I hoped to escape. 

"Naturally," I replied, "I should like to be out of the 
hands of the Turks, although I suppose they will keep 
me till the end of the war. For me it is damnable here. 
But you " 

"For you it is a thousand times better than for me," 
he said, with intensity, though still speaking in a low 
voice. "For two years I have been living among peo- 
ple who are half savage and wholly ignorant. Because 
I am a Christian, they try to treat me like a dog. All 
the time I was with my infantry regiment I never knew 
when one of those Turkish beasts would shoot me. 
Nothing would be done to a Turkish soldier who did 
shoot me. I am certain I have remained untouched 
only because doctors are scarce. Several other doctors — 



32 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Syrians and Jews — ran away and managed to reach 
the British lines; but I had no chance." 

He continued to tell of the disgusting conditions 
which he had to share with Turkish soldiers, who lived 
more like animals then human beings. I happened to 
have met a Syrian doctor who, after escaping from the 
Turkish army, was practising in Alexandria; at which 
my bed neighbour was envious and interested. His 
own intention, if the Turks allowed him to go to his 
home at Damascus until the broken leg healed, was to 
slip out of the city with one of the secret caravans, and 
trek to Akaba, where were the Hedjaz Arabs, allied 
to the British. He suggested that if he and I were 
sent to the same hospital in Damascus we might make 
the attempt together. 

So we talked on in the heat of the afternoon, keeping 
silent for long intervals so as not to excite suspicion. 
All this while the diseased Turk on my left, who could 
speak nothing but Turkish and Arabic, was moaning 
and tossing. 

That evening, after thinking matters over, I decided 
that my slight chances of getting back to the British 
lines by swimming down the coast could scarcely be 
lessened, and might be improved, if I asked the Syrian 
for advice. 

He was very sympathetic and quite unsurprised, but 
he did not think the possibility of success were great, 
because of the thousands of soldiers in the district 
through which I should have to pass. Nevertheless, 
if my leg became stronger I might possibly scrape 
through, he said. As for him, he would like enormously 
to come with me, but his leg made him helpless. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 33 

My thigh improved very rapidly, and I began to 
make final preparations. Each day the Syrian and I 
saved pieces of bread, so that I might have a store to 
take with me. The supply of water would be more 
difficult, as I had nothing in which to carry it. 

A Turkish general solved the problem for me. One 
morning the orderlies tidied the room feverishly until 
it looked almost clean, while announcing that "The 
Pasha" was coming. General Djouad Pasha, com- 
manding the Turkish Eighth Army, arrived soon after- 
ward, attended by a mixed collection of Turkish, Ger- 
man, and Austrian officers — each of which national 
groups kept itself separate, and tried to look as if it 
had no connection with the others. He talked amiably 
to the Turkish patients — amid a chorus of "Yes, Ex- 
cellency," and "No, Excellency" — and more than amia- 
bly to me. Was I getting better and would I like some 
wine sent to me ? The answer in each case was a truth- 
ful "yes." 

To the doctor with the smashed leg he was abrupt 
and aloof when he discovered him to be a Syrian Chris- 
tian; and a request to be sent home until convalescent 
was curtly refused. 

The general left, with his ill-assorted staff elbowing 
each other in the doorway for precedence; and I heard 
the Syrian swearing softly to himself for many minutes. 

From Djouad Pasha came, that same afternoon, two 
bottles of Moselle and a flask of eau-de-cologne, ad- 
dressed to "The English guest of Turkey." 

In that house of a thousand and one stenches the 
eau-de-cologne was as welcome as a well in a pathless 
desert. The Syrian and I drank the wine, leaving a 



34 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

little in one of the bottles to mix with the water I 
should take to the coast. 

The only remaining preparation was as regarded 
clothes. I decided to wear, over a night-shirt, one of 
the smock dressing-gowns provided by the hospital. 
In this and a pair of slippers, and with a towel arranged 
as a headdress, I should not look so very different from 
an Arab at night-time so long as I kept moving. 

Came the day when I walked without the least pain 
or trouble; and although I still could scarcely see with 
the left eye, I determined to leave without delay, as I 
was in danger of being moved from Tul-Keran. 

I kept awake from sunset until three a.m. hoping that 
the Austrian night orderly would follow his usual cus- 
tom of dozing; whereupon I would slip by him into the 
yard and thence climb a drainpipe to the wall that 
rimmed the hospital roof. But the orderly remained 
obstinately alert until it was too late for my attempt; 
for I should have to leave early, if I wanted to put a suf- 
ficient distance between myself and the hospital before 
choosing a hiding-place in which to pass the following 
day. 

Having slept through the afternoon I again watched 
during the night; and again the Austrian kept awake. 
On the next night I fell asleep at two a.m., disappointed 
and almost hopeless when, for the third time, the 
orderly gave me no chance. 

It must have been about half an hour later when I 
was awakened by loud reports and by the chatter of 
the Turks near me. Guns were firing all around the 
town, one of them from a field fronting the hospital. 
I knew that they must be anti-aircraft guns. Either 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 35 

Tul-Keran itself was being raided, or machines were 
passing from some other place. 

Inside the hospital all was disorder. Turkish pa- 
tients talked excitedly, and crowded into the lower 
rooms. In the ward opposite mine a man who, some 
hours earlier, had undergone an operation, called loudly 
for help. The orderly himself, almost helpless from 
fright, ran across in answer to the cries. 

Now — while everything and everybody were in con- 
fusion — or never was my chance to escape from the 
hospital. I rolled up my blanket and placed it under 
the quilt so as to give the appearance of a man asleep, 
donned my dressing-gown, shook hands silently with 
the Syrian, and went out into the yard. 

Somebody passed close by me, and entered the back 
door. I dodged, and locked myself in the lavatory 
until he was in the house. When all was quiet I went 
into the open yard, gripped my parcel (the bottle of 
water and the store of dry bread tied up in a towel) 
between my teeth, and began climbing up the drain 
pipe. 

It was a more difficult task than I expected. The 
wall was flat, and showed few cracks that could be used 
as footholes. I scraped the skin from face, arms, and 
legs as I struggled upward, a few feet at a time. At 
last I was high enough to touch the gutter and haul 
myself, with many a gasp, on to the roof's edge. While 
I was doing this the first disaster happened — the pack- 
age fell from my mouth. 

I kept perfectly still, expecting a loud noise; but the 
parcel fell with nothing worse than a dull thud, the bot- 
tle being saved from breaking by the bread around it. 



36 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Although nobody came into the yard I did not go 
down again, for every minute counted; and, moreover 
I was certain that I should not have the strength to 
climb that drain pipe a second time. I determined to 
make the attempt without bread and water and the 
towel, which was to have served as headdress. 

I clambered along the side of the low roof, keeping 
in the shadow, until I reached the front of the building. 
All was clear for me; the guns were still firing, the street 
was deserted, and the sentry, who should have been 
below, had gone into the hospital for safety. 

I caught hold of the right-hand corner of the gutter 
with both hands, lowered myself until my body was 
hanging down with arms fully extended, and dropped. 

Then came the second disaster. Although the root 
was low, and the length of my body deducted five and 
three-quarter feet from the total drop, yet the shock 
when I touched earth was considerable. I landed pur- 
posely on my left foot, since the left leg was uninjured, 
but I toppled over, and again hurt the bruised thigh, 
which throbbed with pain. 

I lay in the shadow of the wall for a few seconds. 
Then, knowing that I could not remain undiscovered 
for long if I stayed there, I looked around to see if the 
streets were clear. 

Not a soul was about, for the anti-aircraft guns were 
still barking, seemingly at nothing. I went out into 
the vague light of the quarter-moon and began walking 
in the direction of the coast. . 

A hundred yards to westward I was past the strag- 
gling line of buildings, and on the open road. Then 
came several groups of tents by the roadside. After I 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 37 

had left these behind I cut away to the left, across open 
country. 

All this while I was in such a tense and exalted state 
of mind that I did not sense whether the night air was 
warm or cold, nor whether the ground was smooth or 
rough. Pain, however, was a sensation that could 
not be buried by abnormal mental tension. My thigh 
throbbed relentlessly and maddeningly as I stumbled 
on, taking my direction as best I could from the stars. 

By now the guns were silent, and people came from 
their hiding-places. A small band of Bedouins ap- 
proached out of the dimness. I sank to the ground 
until they had ridden by and were on the road. 

Again I began to walk; but a few minutes later I had 
to halt a second time. Two Turkish soldiers, their 
cloth helmets outlined against a tree, passed some dis- 
tance to my right, whining an unmusical chant. 

I staggered forward for about another hundred 
yards; and then, weak and half-mad with the per- 
sistent, ever-increasing ache in my thigh, I lay down 
in a small hollow. 

The next half hour was perhaps the most bitter 
period through which I have lived. I should never 
reach the coast with my injured leg, I realized. Yet 
here I was, wearing but a night-shirt and a dressing- 
gown, and helpless in Turkish territory, only a quarter 
of an hour's walk from the hospital whence I had tried 
to escape. I could go no farther — or very little far- 
ther; and if I remained in the hollow until morning I 
should inevitably be caught. And if I were caught, 
Heaven only knows what would happen. And I sud- 
denly realized that it was cold, and that scores of mos- 



38 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

quitoes were biting my face, arms, and legs. And the 
throb, throb, throbbing in the right leg continued. 

Then the crescent moon disappeared, and the dark 
gray light faded into a blackness that covered the crops 
and countryside and, above all, myself. 

I felt suicidal, and remained inert for half an hour 
longer. Finally, I decided that my best plan was to 
return to the hospital and try to reenter it unob- 
served. 

I staggered back through the darkness, and, more by 
luck than judgment, hit the road. Slowly and very 
painfully I made my way into Tul-Keran. I passed 
the tents and houses without taking any precaution 
against being stopped and questioned; but nobody took 
the least notice, possibly because, in the dark, my 
dressing-gown would look like the robe of an Arab. 

I came within sight of the hospital, and found the 
sentry strolling aimlessly in front of it, from the main 
gate to the side entrance around the corner. When he 
had turned the corner I slipped up the pathway to 
the front door, which, from past observation, I knew 
would not be locked. I had been absent for two hours, 
and already the first glimmer of an eastern dawn had 
lassoed the countryside. 

I unlatched the door, entered the passage — and 
found myself face to face with the Austrian night or- 
derly. Open-eyed with wonder he stared at my dusty 
and dirty dressing-gown, my muddied legs and slippers; 
then grabbed me by the arm, and called out: "Der 
Englander!" 



CHAPTER III 

NAZARETH — AND THE CHRISTIAN CHARITY OF A JEW 

"The Englishman !" he repeated, gripping my arm 
harder than ever. Then, after a puzzled pause : " Where 
have you been?" 

"For a walk. I was upset by the air raid. My 
head has been very bad since the smash, and sometimes 
I don't know what I'm doing. But I'm better now, 
and I give my word of honour that I will stay quietly 
in bed. Only say nothing to the Turks." 

This Austrian had always seemed a good fellow; and 
now, on hearing the word "Ehrenzvort" — word of hon- 
our — he dropped his attitude of anxiety and suspicion, 
and became his usual friendly self. A wounded Turk 
came into the passage to see what was happening, but 
the orderly sent him away. He withdrew with a look 
of surprise at my disordered appearance. 

"Good," replied the Austrian. "I shall say nothing 
to the Turks. But when the corporal comes I shall 
have to tell him, and he will tell the Herr Doktor. But 
I shall ask the corporal not to mention it to the others." 

He led me back to the ward, and there noticed, for 
the first time, how a rolled-up blanket underneath the 
discoloured quilt made my bed seem as if it were oc- 
cupied by a man. 

"Na 9 Na" he said as he straightened the blanket. 

39 



4 o EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

This doesn't look as if you only went for a walk. Well, 
I have your word of honour that you will keep quiet, 
and the Herr Doktor must decide what is to be done." 

Tired out, and so despairing as to care nothing of 
what might happen, I fell asleep. In the heat of mid- 
morning I was awakened by the corporal, who told me 
to come with him to the doctor's room. As I limped 
painfully along the corridor I was still tired and but 
half awake, so that while I remembered an unpleasant 
failure I could not define exactly what had happened. 

"Herr Hauptmann" said the corporal with a grin, 
"your injured leg was not improved by the night 
walk" — and only then did I remember fully the bitter 
happenings of a few hours earlier. 

Charming and decorative as ever, the blue-uniformed, 
much-medalled doctor rose from his chair, and shook 
hands with exaggerated ceremony. The priest stood, 
silent and bowed coldly, as if to imply that my mis- 
deeds were exactly what one would expect from a friend 
of Masaryk. 

"Night walks," said the doctor, "are bad for people 
with injured legs and faces. As your medical adviser, 
I should advise you to remain in bed for the future." 

"I hope I shall be permitted to follow your advice, 
Herr Doktor." 

"That being so, perhaps you will tell us exactly 
where you went, and why you did it." 

Well knowing that with so many indications of an 
attempted escape anything but frankness would be 
futile, I admitted having tried to return to the British 
Army. 

" So ! And now, what do you expect ? " 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 41 

"If I may presume on your kindness, I ask that I 
may stay here until sent away in the normal course of 
events. I hope you will let me remain in hospital 
on the understanding that I give my word of honour to 
be good so long as I am in Tul-Keran." 

"That will be difficult. I myself have no objection, 
and the word of honour is guarantee enough. But if 
the news of your escapade got beyond the hospital I 
should have to make a full report." 

The doctor learned from the corporal that, apart 
from the four of us present, the one person who knew 
the story was the night orderly, who could be trusted 
to keep quiet. After a low-voiced discussion with the 
priest he gave instructions that nobody else must be 
told. He then promised not to make a report, unless 
the news leaked out and his hand were forced thereby. 
I thanked him and withdrew. 

But the story did leak out. Either the orderly told 
it, or the Turkish patient who had seen me in the pas- 
sage, after my return, formed his own conclusions and 
communicated them to other people. At any rate, 
several Turks came into the ward and discussed (ac- 
cording to the Syrian's whispered translations) my 
adventure of the early morning. One man even went 
so far as to say that I had gone out and signalled to the 
British aeroplanes. 

The Syrian was greatly concerned about whether 
anybody knew he had been privy to the attempt; but 
I was able to reassure him. 

Evidently the story became so widely known that the 
hospital authorities had to make their report. Late 
In the afternoon I was told to dress and collect my be- 



42 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

longings, as the Turks were taking me from the hospital. 
Having obeyed, I was handed over to an escort of two 
Turkish soldiers with drawn bayonets. 

"Adieu," said the Syrian. "I shall pray for you s 
and for happier times." 

The doctor shook hands ceremoniously when I left; 
and the priest — affable once more — gave me a heavy 
stick to help support my thigh, saying that he hoped we 
should meet as friends after the war. 

Bareheaded in the searing sun (for my friends had 
forgotten to include a hat in my kit) I was led through 
a gaping crowd to the railroad station. 

There my guards joined forces with another Turk 
who had in his charge the dirtiest Arab I have ever 
seen. His sole dress was a pair of tattered trousers and 
a faded overcoat from the left side of which a filthy 
arm protruded, naked. His headdress, a much-torn 
strip of dingy rag, seemed to have lain for a long time 
in some stagnant pool. Clots of dirt dotted his face, 
his feet, and the lower part of his legs, which were bare. 
His moustache and straggling beard were powdered with 
sand and gravel; and on looking closely at his middle, 
where the trousers tops gave place to uncovered flesh, 
I saw two lice on the inner surface of the rough cloth. 

The Arab and I looked at each other curiously, after 
the manner of fellow-prisoners seeing each other for 
the first time. Then an interrogation, interrupted by 
our arrival, was continued. This consisted of a Turk- 
ish officer shouting menaces at the Arab, who replied, 
whenever he was given a chance, with cringing explana- 
tions and pleading gestures. 

Presently a German interpreter, who spoke Arabic 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 43 

well, joined the group. He also threatened the Arab, 
and I saw him place thumb and finger on his wind-pipe, 
as if to suggest strangling. 

This badgering of the poor brute continued, until 
finally the Arab opened his hands and said something in 
a resigned tone; whereat a thrill of excitement passed 
through the gathering. The Turkish officer, before 
leaving us, wrote several lines on some official papers 
carried by the Arab's guard. 

The Unteroffizier then turned his attention to me, 
and finding that I could speak German, talked of many 
things, from Hindenburg's advance in France to his 
own home in the former German colony at Jaffa. 

"You have a pleasant companion/' he said, nodding 
toward the Arab. 

I asked who the pleasant companion might be and 
heard in reply a strange tale. The Arab, it appeared, 
had been found wandering in the rear of the Turkish 
trenches. The garment he wore was found to be a relic 
of what was once an overcoat of Turkish military pat- 
tern; so that he was arrested as a deserter, and pos- 
sibly a spy. He told a rambling tale of how he had 
been a soldier in an Egyptian battalion fighting for the 
British, but, after being tortured by his officers, had 
escaped across the lines. 

Even the Turks could not be convinced that British 
officers tortured their men; and the Arab having shown 
himself to be a liar, they were more than ever convinced 
that he was also a spy. 

The Turkish officer, in the conversation I overheard, 
had threatened to hang him unless he confessed to be- 
ing a spy. Finally the Arab (who, in my opinion, 



44 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

was not a spy, whatever he might be), terror-stricken 
at the threat that he could only save himself from hang- 
ing by a "confession," let himself be badgered into a 
declaration — true or false — that he was a spy. So 
they hanged him, as I learned afterward, at Damas- 
cus. 

For several hours we remained on the platform, 
where the Arab and I were rival attractions for general 
curiosity. Then, late in the evening, we were hustled 
into a truck, marked in German : " 12 horses or 40 men." 
As a matter of fact, more than fifty Turkish soldiers 
must have crowded into the truck before the train 
started. 

Our party kept together in one of the corners, where 
we found just room enough to sit down without being 
trampled upon. I placed the kit bag between myself 
and the Arab, as a barrier against lice; although, for 
that matter, most of the Turkish soldiers were ver- 
minous. 

That night I performed the first of many nightmare 
journeys on Turkish railways. Although each side of 
the truck was open for about three feet the atmosphere 
was intensely stuffy, so that it was difficult to breathe 
when seated on the floor. The crowd of Turks spat all 
over the place, and exuded dozens of different smells. 
The train jolted unevenly, with many a bump and halt, 
up the badly kept track. Sleep was impossible; and 
by the time I was hauled on to the platform at Afuleh, 
nine hours later, I was heavy-eyed and faint with wake- 
fulness, weakness, and disgust. 

Afuleh is but a few miles from Nazareth (then the 
Turco-German General Headquarters on the Palestine 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 45 

front); and to Nazareth we trudged. This beautiful 
little town is on a high hill around which the road to it 
winds upward at a steep angle. With its white build- 
ings and its pleasant setting Nazareth offers a magni- 
ficent view as one climbs the hill. But really to enjoy 
it the conditions should be other than, when weak and 
ill and scarcely able to walk by reason of a bad leg, one 
must climb painfully up the steep slope under an op- 
pressive sun and with a retinue of half-savage guards 

The Arab and I were led through the old, winding 
streets to the Turkish Platzkommandant's office. The 
Platzkommandant — a swollen balloon of a man — 
asked a question, and the Arab's reply drew all eyes in 
my direction. Having understood only a few words 
of the Arabic I wondered how I could be concerned in 
the charge of spying. 

The Platzkommandant glared at me, and after ex- 
amining my papers, spoke with somebody on the tele- 
phone. Then, although not a word had been spoken 
to me, we were both led outside and through some nar- 
row streets to a stone building. Not until we were in- 
side it did I hear, from a police officer who spoke a little 
French, why I was there. 

Having noticed that rather more consideration was 
given to me than to him, and thinking he might obtain 
better treatment by hanging on to my coat-tails, the 
Arab had elaborated his story by saying that I brought 
him from the British Army in my aeroplane. Evi- 
dently the Platzkommandant, without giving me the 
chance to deny this fantastic tale, had telephoned to 
Turkish General Headquarters which had ordered that 
the spy and I, as accomplices in crime, should be kept 



46 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

together. And here we were, inside what I learned 
was the civil criminal jail. 

I protested with vehemence and ridicule against be- 
lief in the Arab's absurd statement. I pointed out that 
as my machine was a single-seater, his story must be 
impossible. The police officer promised to forward 
these protests to military headquarters; but as for him, 
his orders were that the Arab and I were to remain to- 
gether. In any case, he added, I was probably being 
punished for having tried to escape. 

Remain together we did, in a superlatively filthy cell. 
I would rather live in an American jail than in most of 
the poorer dwellings of the Turkish provinces, where 
donkeys and dogs and hens and men and women and 
children herd together in mud huts. As for most Turk- 
ish jails, I would rather live in an American pigsty, 

Even after my experience on the train from Tul- 
Keran I was surprised by the first sight of that cell. 
The walls were neither stone nor wooden, but of hard 
earth, with holes and cracks all over the surface. The 
various kinds of dirt that crusted the stone floor, which 
must have been left uncleaned for years, had mingled 
and intermingled until they became a thin layer of 
slime, which gave forth a dank odour. The room was 
partly underground, although the small, iron-barred 
window, on a level with the floor of the yard and two 
feet below the stone ceiling, let in a certain amount of 
light. Through it crawled all sorts of insects. Hun- 
dreds of vermin were to be seen moving in and out of 
the fissures in the walls. 

Unadulterated bravery, without any trace of sup- 
pressed or subconscious fear, does not exist; wherefore, 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 47 

if a man who fought in the war tells you that he never 
felt the least bit afraid, call him a liar of the goriest. 
But my experience has convinced me that ordinary 
bravery — the sort of bravery which is self-control in 
the face of danger — is one of the most ordinary of quali- 
ties, possessed by most people of every race, sex, and 
age. But endurance is another matter. To all but 
the lion-hearted there comes the point at which the will 
to endure breaks down under abnormal strain. 

Being far from lion-hearted, this now happened to me. 
When the gendarme banged and bolted the door I be- 
came morally dead, and past caring about surroundings 
or events. Physical weakness, mental agony, a terrible 
dizziness that resulted from having been bareheaded 
in the Palestine sun, the succession of privations and 
revolting surroundings — all these combined to break 
my spirit. 

I grabbed the shrinking Arab, who evidently had not 
reckoned on being left alone with me, and flung him 
across the cell. I then sat down in the nearest corner, 
and, physically and mentally sick, remained inert for 
many hours. 

The next three days I remember as a semi-conscious 
nightmare. Yet a dreadful nightmare is easier to bear 
than a dreadful reality, because the horror of it is con- 
fined to subconsciousness, and does not touch the sur- 
face brain. I sat through hours of inertia, without com- 
prehension, energy, or a sense of my surroundings; so 
that I cared little for the dirt, the stench, and the general 
beastliness of the cell, because I scarcely realized them. 

Three times I tried to pass the door, so as to protest 
to the police officer; but each time I was pushed back 



48 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

by the guard, who made frequent use of the words that 
every prisoner in Turkey knew so well — "yok" and 
"yassak" ("not," and "forbidden"). I gave up the 
attempt, and relapsed into a state of moral lethargy. 

The changes from night to day, from stuffy heat to 
damp cold, passed unnoticed, and I cared not whether 
I lived or died. I felt no hunger and very little thirst. 
This was fortunate, for hunger could not have been 
satisfied. 

Each morning the guards gave each of us a small 
loaf of bad bread in which pieces of straw, string, and 
wood were plentiful. A carafe was filled with bad 
water once a day. In the evening a basin of thin soup, 
with mysterious chunks floating on the surface of it, 
was placed between us. Without being influenced by 
its unsavouriness, I felt not the least desire for the 
greasy liquid, the small loaf of bread being quite enough 
food for the day in my then state of unreal detachment 
from bodily needs and sensations. 

As for the Arab, as soon as the basin was brought 
he squatted on his haunches, dug his hands into the 
soup, and having grabbed some floating morsel, stuffed 
it into his mouth. Afterward he lapped up the liquid 
itself, after the manner of a dog. 

On the morning of the third day we were led from the 
jail to be interrogated at Turkish Headquarters. Al- 
though my ferocious headache still remained, the change 
from the dimness and closeness of the cell to the bright 
sunlight of the street revived me, and I sniffed the fresh 
air in gulps. 

I was passing through Nazareth, watched with evi- 
dent sympathy by the sad-faced crowd, when I saw an 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 49 

officer of the German Flying Corps. He looked at my 
pilot's badge and stopped, whereupon I broke away 
from the guards and approached him. In violent 
language I protested against the outrageous treatment, 
and asked the German as a fellow-aviator and a fellow- 
European, to see that the Turks moved me from the 
criminal jail. 

The aviator happened to be a friend of Oberleutnant 
Wolff, who fired the shot that brought me down near 
Shechem; and, having already heard the details of my, 
capture, he recognized at once the absurdity of the! 
Arab's story that I had brought him across the lines' 
to spy for the British. He himself was furious at my 
bad treatment, for apart from their air combats the re- 
lations between German and British aviators in Pal- 
estine were of the best. He promised to go straight 
to German Air Headquarters and enlist its influence 
for me. 

I left the German and was led by the guards to Turk- 
ish Headquarters. For two hours we waited in a cor- 
ridor; and then, before I had been interviewed, there 
arrived my friend the German pilot with two staff offi- 
cers, a monocled major and a lieutenant. I shook 
hands — and was offered apologies for the brutalities I 
had suffered. It would all be right now, said the major, 
as the trio disappeared through the doorway of an office. 

They returned with a Turkish colonel, who likewise 
shook hands and apologized. Finally, escorted b}r a 
different guard, I was sent away without having been 
questioned. The last I saw of the Arab was as he stag- 
gered and cringed under a box on the ear delivered 
by the colonel. 



50 EASTERN NIGHTS—AND FLIGHTS 

Once again I was led before the Turkish Platzkom- 
mandant. Evidently his knuckles had been telephoni- 
cally rapped as a result of my treatment, for he scowled 
wickedly as he took my papers and ordered a room to 
be prepared for me in the barracks. 

At first this room seemed a paradise after the slimy 
cell; but after a few days of utter loneliness its tiny 
dimensions — ten feet long by six feet wide — seemed to 
be closing in to crush me. The furniture was a bed 
with one greasy blanket and a rickety little table on 
which stood an earthenware jar. 

Next morning I was again taken to Turkish Head- 
quarters for interrogation. The Intelligence Officer 
who questioned me was very far from intelligent in his 
methods. He began by saying outright that since I 
had been moved to better quarters he expected me to 
show gratitude by giving information. I replied that 
instead of showing gratitude, I ought to receive com- 
pensation. He hinted that it was in his power to move 
me back to the criminal jail. 

"Do as you like," I replied. "But since it is obvious 
that you are highly civilized, you will do nothing of the 
kind." Whereupon he smiled fatuously, and proceeded 
to ask leading questions, speaking in French. 

"Is the report true that General Allenby has left 
Palestine for France?" 

"I really don't know. Possibly. Possibly not." 

"Have you seen General Allenby lately?" 

"No. But I have a friend who once saw him driving 
along a road in France. But that was two years ago." 

"Are the British preparing an attack near the 
coast?" 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 51 

"Possibly. Possibly not. I really don't know." 

These illuminating replies were noted down, word 
for word, by the Intelligence Officer. His desire for 
details about myself was inexhaustible. I did my best 
to satisfy it by telling him that I was aged eighteen; 
had been an aviator for five years and a soldier for six; 
had come from England on a ship named the Hog- 
wash; had been flying the type of aeroplane known as 
the Jabberwock; had belonged to No. 1 Training Squad- 
ron, the best fighting squadron in Palestine; and 
thought the war would continue for fifteen and a half 
years longer. 

Having presented the Turk with this medley of mis- 
information, and watched him transfer it to his note- 
book, I grew tired of invention and protested a lack of 
knowledge in reply to every question. 

That chat and backchat with the wooden-headed 
Intelligence Officer was my only conversation, except 
a few whispered words, with a fellow-human for nearly 
a week. The Platzkommandant took his revenge for 
my complaints in two ways — by feeding me very badly, 
and by inflicting solitary confinement upon me. 

Solitary confinement makes a man utterly wretched. 
Left all alone, and with nothing to distract his mind, 
a prisoner can only think and think and think — and all 
his thoughts are morbid. 

I had six matches in my pocket and with these I 
invented all sorts of games and puzzles. But after a 
few hours my brain, refusing to concentrate on them, 
drifted back to the sea of bitter despair. At night-time 
the great difficulty was to keep my mind, not from 
drifting, but from racing. 



5 2 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

After four days of solitary confinement I was fast 
losing all sense of balance and normality. At times I 
regretted not being back in the criminal jail with the 
repulsive Arab for company. 

The few words I managed to exchange with the Chris- 
tian woman who tidied my room each morning were 
an unspeakable joy. This woman — ragged, bootless, 
and gaunt — would whisper fierce questions in broken 
French as she threw water on the dusty floor, or stab- 
bed with a hairpin some of the bed-bugs, while a guard 
watched through the open door to see that we did not 
conspire. 

"Why come not English? We hungry. Pigs of 
Turks!" 

And I had to whisper back that the English would 
come and drive the pigs of Turks out of Nazareth. 

When she had taken her stooping back and her patch- 
work clothes out of the room, I would probably not 
have the chance to speak with anybody, even in a whis- 
per, for the next twenty-four hours. 

Apart from the furniture I had nothing to look at 
but a green hillside, seen through the tiny window. 
For hours at a time I paced the few feet across the room 
and back again, then sat on the bed and looked through 
the little window at what little I could see of Nazareth. 

Several times I noticed men, women, and boys walk- 
ing in a huddled group, with guards around them. 
Some had their hands shackled, some had a chain link- 
ing one arm and one leg, others were chained by the 
arm to the next person. They moved aimlessly over 
the hillside, presumably for exercise, while Turkish 
soldiers pushed or beat any who struggled or straggled. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 53 

On my sixth morning in the barracks I was visited 
by the Platzkommandant's aide-de-camp, just after 
such a party had disappeared from view. I asked if 
these shackled and browbeaten prisoners were Chris- 



tians 



My dear sir," said the aide-de-camp, with all the 
blandness of the educated Turk when telling a lie, "we 
never put chains on anybody, and our Christian crim- 
inals are as well treated as Mohammedan criminals. 
You must be mistaken in what you think you have seen." 

After this conversation I never again saw these groups 
of civilian captives at Nazareth; and I began to think 
that the strain of solitary confinement had focussed 
my sick brain on sights that my eyes never met. Pos- 
sibly, however, the aide-de-camp had taken care that 
the chained prisoners should be taken for exercise on 
the far side of the hill. 

Next day the same officer paid me another visit, as 
he was learning French and wanted practice. When 
he was in my room I noticed from the window a strange 
procession. A few banners were carried at the head of 
it, then came some Turkish soldiers, and finally a mass 
of men and women shambling along with bowed heads. 
Somewhere a band was blowing out the horrible whining 
discord that the Turks call music. Nothing more 
melancholy and unenthusiastic than the people's atti- 
tude could be imagined. 

"What's that?" I asked. 

"Two days ago the Turks gained a great victory over 
the British in the Jordan valley, between Es-Salt and 
Amman. The Governor has organized this procession 
to celebrate it. The population is showing its joy." 



54 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

I looked at the sad-faced rabble below, and remarked 
that they looked more like mourners at a funeral than 
celebrators of joy. The aide-de-camp had spoken, how- 
ever, without the least suggestion of irony. 

Next day he left Nazareth for Tul-Keran. He paid 
me a farewell visit, and, to my great joy, gave me "an 
English book," which he had bought in the bazaar. 
The "English book" proved to be a copy of a magazine 
for children, dated 1906. It was even more consciously 
educative in its exposition of elementary principles, 
and more condescendingly inept in its milk-and-water 
stories, than the general run of such publications. Yet 
in my state of solitary confinement I revelled in every 
word. That magazine for children gave me as much 
pleasure as have the finest books in the world under 
normal conditions. 

My mind stopped racing and wandering and retro- 
specting while I learned all about wireless telegraphy, 
in twenty lines; how Joshua smote the Canaanites 
hip and thigh (with an illustration of the walls of Jericho 
falling rhythmically before the Israelite trumpeters); 
How to make lemonade and seed cake; How not to make 
trouble among one's schoolfellows; The birth and life 
of jelly-fish; and How to Set a Good Example, being 
an instalment of the History of Little Peter, the Boy 
who Feared God, Kept His Hands Clean, and Was 
Always Cheerful and Respectful and Fond of Chopping 
Wood for His Mother. 

The magazine also showed how to make hats, sail- 
ing-boats, houses, and whatnots out of a plain sheet of 
paper — all of which I practised assiduously through a 
night of bug-biting sleeplessness. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 55 

Best and worst of all was the five-page summary, in 
schoolmistress English, of "The Newcomes." This 
had nothing in it but colourless statement of incident; 
and the sentiment of the book was churned into a welter 
of flabbiness. As a final insult " adsum" was misspelt 
"adsem" in the subjoined monstrosity with which the 
unliterary procureur completed his (or more probably 
her) prostitution of Thackeray's almost-masterpiece: 

When the roll call of the pensioners was made the dying 
Colonel, hearing his name, lifted his poor old head and said: 
"adsem" Then he fell back dead. "Adsem" is a Latin word 
signifying that a person is present. 

Yet the protest and anger inspired by this outrage were 
useful in taking my mind from its lonely bitterness; and 
I read the child's; magazine version of "The Newcomes" 
many times over, until its power to irritate was expended. 

After a few more days my confinement became less 
solitary. The German major whom I had already seen 
visited me, with the Turkish Platzkommandant, and 
asked if I had any more complaints to make. I looked 
at the Platzkommandant, and said that the food was 
not only bad, but scarcely sufficient to keep a man 
alive. The fat Turk scowled his wickedest, but made 
no comment. The German major expressed regret, 
and promised that meals should be sent from the Gen- 
eral Staff's mess. 

Evidently the German Staff in Palestine made a 
careful study of its own comfort. For the rest of my 
stay in Nazareth I fed better than I could have done, 
under war-time conditions, in any London hotel. Meat, 
fish, vegetables, every kind of fruit, butter, sugar, 



56 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

pastries, good coffee and wine, all were sent in profu- 
sion — to the great disgust of the Turkish officers, who 
were fed rather worse than the German privates. 

This diet was a very welcome change from bad bread 
and water varied by thin soup. Sickness made me far 
from hungry, however, so that I found it impossible to 
eat many of the meals. The corporal of the guard, the 
sentry outside my door, and several of their friends 
would hang around in the corridor until the tray was 
taken from my room, then stuff their hands in the dishes 
and snatch at pieces of meat or vegetable. 

For me the food from the German mess was chiefly 
welcome in that it brought me a good friend — the 
dragoman who came with it. He was a Jew, originally 
from Salonika, with a long, tongue-twisting name im- 
possible to remember, so that I called him Jean Willi, 
French being our conversational medium. He was 
well-to-do, had been an official of the Ottoman Bank in 
Constantinople, and spoke seven languages. For the 
first two years of war he kept out of the army by means 
of baksheesh. Finally he was taken for service because 
he offended an influential officer; but his knowledge of 
languages, together with bribes placed in the right quar- 
ters, procured for him the safe appointment of a drago- 
man to the German Headquarters at Nazareth. 

Three times a day — with breakfast, lunch, and din- 
ner — Jean Willi visited me. He tried to come oftener, 
but the Turks would not admit him. 

Everything I wanted he would move heaven and 
earth to get. He "obtained" a German soldier's cap 
for me, on discovering that I had no hat. He per- 
suaded the German barber to bring the lunch one day, 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 57 

so that he might cut my hair. A comb, a tooth-brush, 
soap, books, and a dozen other things were brought 
by Jean Willi; and, having learned that my ready 
cash amounted to three and a half dollars, he pretended 
that the articles were sent by the German officers. 
Afterward I discovered this to have been a benevolent 
untruth. 

The wayside fallings of a roving life have brought me 
several Very Good Samaritans, but none other who did 
as much for me, under great difficulties, as Jean Willi. 
Before meeting him I was altogether broken in spirit; 
and with hopelessness filling my mind I had actually 
begun to fear for my reason. He understood all this 
and, to the limit of his powers, did his best to remedy 
it, well knowing that such action would bring him the 
enmity and suspicions of Turkish officers. His friendly 
conversation and his invariable kindness were splendid 
tonics, taken three times a day, at each visit. 

When he was away my mind was prevented from 
slipping back into the stagnation of despair by the books 
he smuggled into my room. The first of these was a 
German war novel — " Der Eiserne Mann' — procured 
from a Boche soldier. It purported to show how loyal 
were the Alsatians to the German Fatherland. It was 
untrue, stupidly sentimental, and often farcical; but, 
after all, so were most of the war novels published in 
England at that time. 

Then, in some dark recess of the house where he was 
billeted, he found a copy of " Les liaisons danger euses" — • 
an altogether extraordinary book to be salvaged from 
a little house in Nazareth. This was my first introduc- 
tion to Barbery d'Aureville: and joy and interest in 



58 EASTERN NIGHTS—AND FLIGHTS 

his magnificent characterization completed the rescue 
of my mind from the slough of despondency. 

It was Jean Willi who first gave me an outline of 
Turkey's spiritual history during the war. The sudden 
savage onslaught of the Turks against their Christian 
subjects; the horrible character of the Armenian massa- 
cres; the murder of prominent Syrians, the deportation 
of Ottoman Greeks; the gradual starvation of the rotten 
old empire, whereby scores of thousands died of hunger, 
while the Germans were sending trainload after train- 
load of foodstuffs from the country; the ruthless execu- 
tion of all who stood in the way of Enver and Talaat; 
the amazing bribery and speculation; the hundreds 
of thousands of deserters, and the scores of thousands 
of brigands — all this was described in such vivid detail 
by Jean Willi that I scarcely believed he could be re- 
lating fact. 

Two-thirds of the population, he said, were pro-En- 
tente — not only the Christians and Arabs, but the very 
Turks themselves — although none dared oppose the 
violence of the Young Turk party. As for himself, 
although he had never been to England, this Jew with- 
out a country claimed to have a frantic love of the 
English which he could not explain, like the love of a 
man for a mistress whom he very greatly respects — ■ 
his own words. 

One day there arrived four Australian aviators who 
had been captured in the Jordan Valley. R., the pilot 
of a Bristol Fighter, had landed behind the Turkish 
lines after his petrol tank was hit. H. had tried very 
pluckily to pick him up. H. made a splendid landing 
and — with R. and R.'s observer seated on the lower 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 59 

planes, one on each side of the pilot's cockpit, attempted 
to take his two-seater into the air with a load of four 
men. He might well have succeeded if R. had not 
jerked his body backward, to avoid a hot blast from 
the exhaust outlet; with the result that the equilibrium 
was upset, and the craft swung round and hie a pile of 
stones. The four officers burned their machines before 
they were captured. 

The Australians and I were taken for interrogation 
to German Headquarters. We had agreed that our 
best plan would be to claim complete ignorance of 
everything, and the invariable answer of C, the first 
to enter the private office of the intelligence officer — 
one Leutnant Santel — was "I don't know." When 
H., the second on the list, adopted the same tactics, 
Santel tried bluff. 

"Sol" he said, softly, as if speaking to himself. 
"How happy am I that it is I and not another who 
makes the interrogation. Most people would order 
bad treatment for prisoners who refuse a correct reply. 
Even I may have to do this. If the Pasha says to me: 
'What have you learned from these prisoners?' and I 
reply: 'They say they know nothing,' he will be very 
angry and order severe measures." 

"Uh-huh"— fromH. 

"Ah, sorry, I forgot you, my friend," said Santel with 
a start. . . . "Your aeroplanes are useful in com- 
municating with the Bedouins east of the Jordan, are 
they not?" 

"I don't know." 

"But I do know." 

"Why ask me then?" — the reply obvious. 



6o EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

"You don't know! You don't know! So! Please 
leave the room." 

H. returned to us; and none of the remaining was 
questioned that day. 

Leutnant Santel adopted a more subtle method next 
morning. With Oberleutnant von Heimburg ("bro- 
ther of the famous submarine commander," as Santel 
introduced him), staff officer of the German Flying 
Corps at Palestine Headquarters, he came to the bar- 
racks and invited C., R., and me to Haifa for the day, 
on condition that we gave parole until the return. 

We accepted and agreed, but while getting ready I 
remembered how, before my capture, it had been my 
duty to extract information from a German pilot while 
entertaining him; and I warned the others not to be 
drawn into friendly talk about aeroplanes and opera- 
tions. 

It was as we expected. While we were driving to 
Afuleh aerodrome for lunch in the Flying Corps mess, 
Von Heimburg and Santel refrained from mention of 
the war, but at table they performed the usual trick 
of showing photographs of British aerodromes and 
pilots, in the vain hope that on recognizing them we 
would say something useful. 

Next we travelled along a narrow-gauge line to Haifa 
in a swaying truck, the motive power of which was a 
tractor propellor, driven by a 160 H. P. Mercedes aero- 
engine. Once again, over tea at the Mount Carmel 
Hotel in Haifa, the Germans led the talk to Palestine 
operations and aeroplanes; and once again we led it 
back to shoes and ships and sealing-wax and cabbages 
and kings. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 61 

When Santel betrayed a desire for knowledge of the 
habits and exploits of Colonel Lawrence (who was per- 
forming such magnificent work as political officer with 
the Arab army of the King of the Hedjaz) H. said he 
had never heard of him, but that in Australia he knew 
a fellow named Lawrence, who — who 

Santel interrupted and did not try to conceal his 
annoyance. Then he began talking about Miss Ger- 
trude Bell, an Englishwoman who had done brilliant 
political work among the Mesopotamian Arabs. This 
time we were able to say with truth that we knew noth- 
ing of the matter; although Santel continued to discuss 
and libel the lady, whom the Germans were going to 
shoot, he said. 

Von Heimburg then praised the British Air Service, 
with many a pause that invited comment from us. The 
pauses remained empty, and we managed to exclude 
the war by pretending to compare painstakingly and 
assiduously the respective merits of English and Aus- 
tralian girls. 

After tea, while bathing in the Mediterranean with 
the Germans, we saw a strange sight along the sea- 
front. A line of not less than thirty fishing-craft were 
left stranded on the beach, with great holes knocked 
in their sides, so that they might not be floated. This 
drastic prevention of the use of small vessels, according 
to Santel, was because many Greek and Syrian fisher- 
men had spied for the British or deserted to Cyprus. 

"The same thing has happened over there," he 
added, pointing across the bay toward Acre, "and at 
other places, too — Tyre, Sidon, Beyrout, and every 
port on the coast-line of Asia Minor." 



62 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

We noticed, however, that three boats were out at 
sea, presumably fishing for the tables of officers and 
officials. 

"If we could get back here some night, " whispered 
C. as we dressed, "we might collar one of those three 
boats, tow it out to sea by swimming, and sail to Jaffa. " 
This revived my hopes of escape for the first time since 
the fiasco at Tul-Keran. 

"Thank you a thousand times," I said when Von 
Heimburg and Santel left us at Nazareth. "It has 
been a most enjoyable day." 

They agreed, without showing enthusiasm. 

"But not a very successful one for you, I'm afraid," 
I added. 

They were quiet for a minute, and then both laughed. 

"So/ You were prepared," said Santel. "Well, I 
shan't try again." 

Neither Santel nor anybody else tried again to inter- 
rogate us at Nazareth; and two days later we were told 
to prepare for a journey to Damascus. 

C. had been discussing the chances of escaping by 
boat; and when Jean Willi paid me a farewell visit I 
asked him if a journey from Damascus to the coast 
would be difficult. 

"Very difficult indeed under the conditions of which 
you are thinking." Then, after a pause, "But I will 
tell you something interesting, since you will probably 
be kept in Damascus for about a fortnight. The 
Armenians run secret caravans from Damascus to 
Akaba." 

"Thank you. That's very interesting, indeed." 
And it was; for Akaba, at the northeastern extremity 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 63 

of the Red Sea, was the base of the Arab army co- 
operating with the British. 

Jean Willi would not listen to thanks, when he said 
good-bye. I gave him my London address, in the sin- 
cere hope of being able to pay back in part the good 
deeds I owed him. 

I left Nazareth under much better conditions than 
I entered it. Accompanied by an Arab pseudo-spy, 
I had arrived half crazed by weakness, pain, and dis- 
aster, with a damaged leg and a swollen face, and pos- 
sessing neither hope nor a hat. I was leaving it in the 
company of fellow-officers, with my mind and leg and 
face normal again, and having not only a German hat 
but renewed hopes of escape, summed up in Jean 
Willi's hint: 

"The Armenians run secret caravans from Damascus 
to Akaba." 



CHAPTER IV 

DAMASCUS — AND THE SECOND FAILURE 

Nazareth and Damascus are wonderful names; and 
apart from historical values each, with the country 
around it, stands for exceptional beauty. A journey 
from Nazareth to Damascus, therefore, "gives of the 
most finest pleasure"; as the Greek guard of a Turkish 
train assured us in his "most finest" English. But if you 
wish to see Syria at its best, travel otherwise than as a 
prisoner, sitting in a dirty cattle-truck and surrounded 
by Turkish guards, whose natural odour gives by no 
means of the most finest pleasure. 

Such were the conditions under which we — four 
Australian officers and myself — came to Damascus. 
All the way from Nazareth we were guarded closely 
as a secret meeting of the Peace Conference. Only 
three weeks earlier Major Evans had escaped from 
Afuleh and walked forty miles before he was recaptured; 
so that in our case more than ordinary precautions 
were taken. 

We drove down the steep hill from Nazareth in three 
rickety carts. Each of the first two contained a pair 
of prisoners and a pair of guards, with loaded rifles and 
fixed bayonets; but H., whose giant height and strength 
the Turks respected, had a cart and two guards all to 
himself. At Afuleh we sat until nightfall in a mud 

64 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 65 

hut, with the local population gazing and chattering 
through the open door, as if we had been strange 
animals. 

We welcomed the change to a covered cattle-truck 
on the railway, away from prying Turks and Arabs. 
In this truck, with coats serving as pillows, we lay on 
the filthy floor throughout the night, while the train 
jolted eastward over the badly kept track. Whenever 
I looked at the half-open shutter I met the alert eyes of 
a guard, whose business it was to prevent us from jump- 
ing into the darkness. 

The next day we passed in playing poker, in looking 
at the wild hills of Samaria, and, by juggling with the 
few French words he could understand, in trying to tell 
the Arab officer in charge of us how contented were the 
Arab population in those parts of Palestine, Arabia, and 
Mesopotamia occupied by the British. 

This man, like most of the Syrian Arabs, showed him- 
self well-disposed to prisoners. He presented us with 
bread and hard-boiled eggs, bought with his own money, 
and refused to take payment. As always, no food had 
been provided by the military authorities. 

So we jogged on, with many a halt, across the Jordan 
and round and up the winding tracks in the hill country 
beyond it. We stopped for an hour at Deraa, where a 
Turkish doctor with pleasant manners and a dirty 
hypodermic needle visited the truck. Having assured 
us that cholera was very prevalent in the British army, 
he proceeded to inoculate us, so that we might have no 
chance of taking the disease to Damascus. As a mat- 
ter of fact, the British army in Palestine was entirely 
free from cholera, while Damascus, as we afterward 



66 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

learned, was full of it. Fortunately, nothing worse 
than sore chests resulted from the use of his rusty, 
unsterilized needle. 

Then, just before sunset, we rounded a bend at the 
bottom of a hill and came upon Damascus; and forget- 
ful of captivity and cattle-trucks and guards and their 
attendant smells, I held my breath for the beauty of it. 
Away to the north stretched a belt of grainland vivid 
in browns and greens. Beyond was a wooded area 
reaching to the lower slopes of the mountain range that 
extends from Lebanon to Damascus. Down the lower 
slopes of one of the most easterly mountains flow the 
sources of Pharpar and Abana, the twin rivers. The 
streams twist downward until they lose themselves in 
a detached part of the old town, perched several hun- 
dred feet above the rest of the city. 

Farther below is Damascus itself — a maze of flat 
buildings, squat mosques, and minaret spires, all in 
gray-white, as if sprinkled with the powder of time, 
and now smudged with faint rose by the sinking sun- 
light. Eastward and southeastward stretches the great 
desert that leads to the sites of Babylon and Nineveh, to 
Bagdad, to Persia, to the beginnings of human history. 

In Damascus, as I knew from intelligence officers 
of the Palestine army, were many friends of the British. 
Nearly all the population, in fact, were secretly anti- 
Turk and anti-German. Could we make use of these 
sentiments in planning an escape? What experiences 
and adventures awaited us in this oldest standing city 
of the world, that was famous in the days of Abraham, 
very famous in the days of Haroun-al-Raschid, and 
still famous in the days of Woodrow Wilson ? 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 67 

The first few of these experiences were by no means 
pleasant. Surrounded by the gleaming bayonets and 
eyes of the guards, who were clearly anxious lest we 
should disappear in the fading light, we were hustled 
from the railway to the police station, and locked in 
a tiny room for four hours. 

Finally, just before midnight, the police led us to 
Baranki Barracks, a large building used as a prison for 
military criminals. Tired, hungry, and disconsolate, 
we fell asleep on the bare bedsteads of the room as- 
signed to us. 

But not for long. It must have been about two 
hours later when I awoke, tingling all over and vaguely 
uncomfortable. To my surprise I saw that C. was 
standing by his bed, and, by the light of my candle, 
was stabbing at it. M. sat up suddenly, scratched him- 
self, and swore softly in a series of magnificent Austra- 
lian oaths. R., who had not undressed, still slumbered. 

Otcch! More sharp stingings came from my legs and 
arms. Bugs, and swarms of them! 

In the prison at Nazareth I had lived with scores of 
the little red brutes so common in the Near East; but 
here there were hundreds. They were crawling down 
the wall, falling on the floor, and biting every bit of 
flesh left exposed. I lit a candle and found dozens 
on my bed. 

Lying on the floor having proved to be as impossible 
as lying on the bed, I went to the window and looked 
into the night, thinking of the one matter that inter- 
ested me in those days — escape. Across the road was 
a large camp bordered on the left by a meadow and on 
the right by one of the seven streams of Damascus. 



68 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Straight ahead, weirdly colossal in the moonlight, were 
two great mountains. Beyond them, I knew, the great 
desert stretched through hundreds of miles to Mesopo- 
tamia. I was aware just how far the British Mesopo- 
tamian army had arrived on the way from Bagdad to 
Mosul; but even if we were lucky enough to find a guide 
who could smuggle us into an eastward-moving caravan 
it would be almost impossible to make a detour around 
the Turkish army; and in any case we should be de- 
pendent on the help of Kurds or Mesopotamian Arabs, 
who are much less estimable than the Arabs of Syria 
and Arabia. No, that plan was not feasible. 

I considered the suggestion of C. — that we should 
make our way to the coast, hiding in the daytime and 
walking only at nights, and then, arrived at Acre or 
Tyre, or some such seaport, commandeer a sailing- 
boat and make for Cyprus or Jaffa. For this plan, 
also, the difficulties would be many and serious. Such 
few boats as were still serviceable would be well guarded. 
Even if we managed to steal one of them, it would have 
to be towed into deep water by swimmers, which was 
scarcely practicable in the darkness. In any case, a 
walk to the coast from Damascus must cover many 
nights. A guide would be essential, as otherwise we 
could buy no bread on the journey, since none of us 
spoke Arabic. And a guide would cost a deal of money, 
of which we had little. 

My scheme of getting into touch with the secret 
caravans, by means of which Arabs and Armenians 
were slipping southward from Damascus to Akaba, still 
seemed the best. But here, again, money would be 
needed, besides a reliable intermediary. Money we 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 69 

might obtain by smuggling a letter to the Spanish con- 
sul, who had taken charge of British interests in Damas- 
cus. As for an intermediary, we should have to trust 
the gods to give us one from among the guards. 

Whatever we did would have to be done quickly, 
for we should not be long in Damascus. By the time 
I had reached this conclusion I was tired enough to 
fall asleep despite the bugs. 

The morning toilet included a ceremony that every 
prisoner in Turkey found it necessary to perform after 
travelling on the railway — a careful hunt for lice in our 
clothes. The search was productive, and led to talk of 
the plague of typhus which was being spread all over 
Turkey by these vermin. 

For the rest of the morning nothing happened, except 
a short visit from the commandant. By now, having 
eaten nothing for twenty-four hours, we were irritable 
with hunger. I made known this fact to the com- 
mandant, who promised that we should feed at midday. 

With him came a little interpreter, with bent shoul- 
ders, a greasy face, and an absurdly long nose. Here, 
I thought, is a possible intermediary; and I asked him to 
return later. During the afternoon he entered softly 
and announced: 

"I am George, interpreter of English. I am friend of 
English, honest to God." 

George was a native of Beyrout, part Syrian, part 
Greek, part Jew, and wholly scoundrel. Were I writing 
fiction I should call him a Syro-Phoenician, which is an 
impressive term but means nothing; but as George 
really happened, I can only describe him as a Levantine 
mongrel. 



7 o EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Some time or other in his chequered life he spent 
three months in America, where he learned to say 
"Honest to God" quite well, and to speak a queer jar- 
gon of Anglo-American quite badly. By reason of this 
accomplishment he became interpreter of English at 
Baranki Barracks. 

However, since he spoke French much better than 
he tried to speak English, conversation with him was 
possible. He had the Levantine habit of using "won 
cher" in every alternate sentence when speaking French; 
and this he applied to his English by saying "my dear" 
on the least provocation. 

M., who could not speak French, asked him to smug- 
gle a letter to the Spanish consul. 

"My dear," he replied, "I take it with lots of hap- 
piness. My officer shall not know the letter, I guess." 

The Spanish consul replied by return, and next day 
we were each presented with twenty Turkish pounds — 
about sixty dollars at the then rate of exchange. This 
rather annoyed the Turkish commandant, who had 
himself given us seven Turkish pounds each, being our 
first month's pay as captive officers. 

With four hundred dollars between us we were now 
in a much better position to prepare a scheme of escape. 
I decided to plumb the depths of George's "I am a 
friend of English, honest to God." We should have 
to take him with us, if possible, for if we left him be- 
hind he would be suspected and the Turks might 
frighten him into betraying us. 

An opportunity came that same evening. George 
had been telling of the starvation in Damascus, of the 
deaths from destitution all over Syria, of the hangings 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 71 

without trial, of the general discontent, of the terrible 
conditions of his own imprisonment for sixty days, 
because he had been suspected of spying for the King 
of the Hedjaz. 

"Wouldn't you like," said M., "to be away from this 
nightmare of a life and in a peaceful country like 
Egypt?" 

"I guess yes, my dear," said George. "But I desire 
to quit the East and live among English." 

"Well," said C., "I could find you a comfortable job 
in Australia." 

"Very obliged. I take your address and write when 
war shall finish." 

"That's no good. None of us may be alive when the 
war is over. How would you like to take the job now ? " 

"What can you desire to say, my dear?" 

There was an awkward pause. We were shy of 
carrying the matter further; for chance-met Levan- 
tines, like politicians, do not as a rule inspire confidence. 

Yet it had to be done. I continued the conversation 
in French, George's weird English not being a good 
medium for the discussion of secrets. 

"If," I promised, "you help us to escape and come 
with us, we will give you not only money, but a job for 
life in Australia." 

George's face whitened suddenly, and for the rest of 
that evening his hands shook with excitement. 

"There is nothing I wish so much, mon cher" he 
said, "as to escape to the British. But it is very diffi- 
cult and would need much money. Also I have so 
little courage." 

George went into the corridor to see if the guard 



72 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

showed suspicions. But the sentry — a black Suda- 
nese — was sitting on the floor, gazing at and thinking 
of nothing, after his usual stupid fashion. 

George returned, and for half an hour we discussed 
and rediscussed possibilities. He pronounced the 
scheme of walking to the coast in a series of night 
marches, and then stealing a boat, to be impossible. 
The idea of joining a caravan to Akaba he judged more 
hopeful, but that would mean hiding in Damascus 
until the next party was ready to start. Hiding in 
Damascus would be not only highly dangerous but 
highly expensive. Anyhow, the Armenians who or- 
ganized the secret caravans must be shy of adding im- 
mensely to their risks by taking British officers, and 
if they did take such risks they would expect to receive 
more ready money than we possessed. 

George was silent for several moments, and then 
announced that he would try to find an Arab, from 
among his acquaintances, who would lead us to Deraa, 
and thence through the mountains to the Dead Sea 
regions. For this also, he pointed out, money would 
be necessary — and gold, not paper. We could change 
our paper notes only at the rate of four and a half paper 
pounds for one in gold; and the sum obtained by this 
means would be too little. 

"But," I pointed out, "if we go below the Dead 
Sea to the country occupied by the Hedjaz army, we 
can get gold enough. Haven't you heard of the gold 
at 'X', of a certain Arab emir and of certain British 
officers ? " 

"Mon cher, I have heard a lot of this gold, and so 
have many of the Bedouins around here. But perhaps 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 73 

I shall not be able to convince my friend that you could 
obtain money from it." 

I gave George arguments enough to convince his 
friend, and made him swear by his professed Chris- 
tianity that he would keep secret our conversation. 
Soon afterward he left us, still trembling with excite- 
ment. 

Full of renewed hope, I looked out of the window into 
the Eastern evening, and speculated on what the god 
of chance might do for us. To be effective he would 
have to do a lot. There was, for example, the Austrian 
sentry whom I could see below, leaning against a motor 
lorry. If he were about, on whatever night we fixed 
for our escape, how could we climb down to the ground 
unobserved ? The window itself offered no difficulties, 
for it was above the street and on the first floor, so that 
a few bedclothes tied together would suffice to lower 
a man out of the barracks. 

Then, while I was still watching the sentry, a differ- 
ent god intervened. A hooded girl sidled up to him, 
and after looking around to see that nobody was watch- 
ing, he crossed the road, and disappeared with her into 
the meadow to the left of the camp. An omen, I 
thought. If, on escape-night, chance spirited away 
obstacles as easily as that, all would be well. 

Meanwhile the flat, gray houses whitened in the light 
of the young moon, and the river Abana radiated 
soft shimmerings. In this respect, also, chance should 
favour us. About a week later, when we hoped to 
leave, the moon would not rise until after midnight; 
so that darkness would help us to slip from the barracks, 
and moonlight would help us as we moved across open 



74 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

country. Just then my meditations were chased away 
by a fantastic, far-away sound. Somewhere in the 
maze of streets a wheezy barrel organ was playing — 
playing Funiculi, Funicula/ How a barrel organ found 
itself in Damascus, and in war-time Damascus, I did 
not try to guess. All I knew, or wanted to know, was 
that across the warm, sensitive night air there floated 
the lively old tune : and if you are away from Europe 
take it from me that nothing will bring you to the back 
streets of London, of Paris, of Naples as quickly as a 
barrel organ playing Funiculi, Funicula. For long after 
the barrel organ had become silent, and only the moon- 
light and the stillness remained, I was back in England. 

Late next morning George burst into the room, 
with a beaming face and a palpable desire for news 
telling. 

"Mon cher" he said to me, "I have found a Druse 
who will guide you. He knows about the gold, and al- 
though not quite sure, he thinks he can trust you, as 
British officers, to see that he gets paid. He demands 
two hundred pounds in gold when you reach 'X', and 
fifty pounds in paper now, for the hire of horses." 

I was overjoyed at this new prospect of a road to 
liberty; but when I had translated George's French for 
the benefit of the Australians, M. counselled caution. 

"I don't like the sound of that fifty pounds down," 
he said. "Tell him we won't pay anything until we're 
outside Damascus and have the horses." 

We decided that unless we conformed to the custom 
of always beating down a bargain-adversary, the Druse 
would think we could be blackmailed for any amount 
of money. He might even regard too ready an ac- 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 75 

ceptance of his terms as evidence that we did not mean 
to pay on arrival at "X." 

Finally, we told George to place the following terms 
before the Druse — one hundred pounds in gold on ar- 
rival, and fifty pounds paper when we were on horse- 
back and away from Damascus. For the present, 
nothing. As for George himself, he should receive fifty 
English pounds when we reached safety and his job in 
Australia. 

Next day George returned from the bazaar with the 
reply that the Druse would be satisfied with one hun- 
dred and twenty-five pounds in gold at "X," and agreed 
to leave the question of ready money for the horses 
until we were out of Damascus. He demanded another 
twenty pounds, paper, however, for the man who was to 
bring back the horses after we had ridden to the moun- 
tains at Deraa. To these terms we agreed, as the 
withdrawal of the demand for money in advance evi- 
denced the genuine intentions of the Druse. 

"The Druse desires to spot you," said George, break- 
ing into English. "To-morrow an officer will lead you 
to public baths. When I say to make attention, ob- 
serve a man who carry yellow burnous and robe." ■ 

And so it happened. We had our bath, and, es- 
corted by a Greek doctor in the Turkish army, with 
several guards and George the inevitable, we walked 
through the hot streets toward the bazaar. 

"Honest to God!" said George suddenly — for it had 
been agreed that this phrase should signal the presence 
of the Druse. 

J I searched the crowd of Arabs gathered in the road 
at the corner of a narrow turning, and had no difficulty 



76 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

in picking out, right in the foreground, a tall, fierce- 
moustached man, with yellow robe and yellow head- 
dress. One hand rested on the bone butt of a long 
pistol stuck through his sash, and with the other he 
fingered the two rings round his burnous. He looked 
at us long and intently, especially at H., with his six 
feet four inches of magnificent physique; then backed 
into the growing crowd and disappeared. 

"Don't look to behind you, my dear," said George, 
whose inability to control himself had again blanched 
his face, "or my officer observe." 

That walk to and from the big hammam in the centre 
of Damascus is perhaps the most vivid of my memories 
of the city. Wherever we passed, a mass of Arabs 
and nondescripts surged around us, until the road was 
blocked and our guards had to clear the way forcibly. 
Bargaining at the stalls was suspended as we moved 
through the long, covered-in bazaar, with its carpets 
and prayer rugs, its blood-sausages, its necklaces in 
amber, turquoise, and jade, its beautiful silks and tawdry 
cottons, its copper work, its old swords and pistols, its 
dirty, second-hand clothes — all laid out haphazard for 
inspection. Once, when we entered a shop, the crowd 
that collected before it was so large that the guards 
took us outside by a back door. 

Yet one sensed that this interest was for the most 
part friendly. The Arabs expected the British army 
sooner or later, and wanted the British army. Mean- 
while, they were anxious to see what manner of men 
were the British officers. We were not a very impres- 
sive group, with our dirty, much-creased uniforms. 
What saved us, from the point of view of display, was 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 77 

the tall, upright figure and striking features of H., at 
whom everyone gazed in admiration. 

As we passed through the gardens on the way home 
an imam, from the ground before a mosque, was chant- 
ing something to a small gathering. On investigation 
we found a large map of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles 
marked out in the soil, with hills and trenches and guns 
and battleships shown on it. The imam was telling the 
Faithful just how the unbelievers had been driven off 
the peninsula by the invincible Turkish army. This 
he did each afternoon, we were assured. 

Everywhere was evidence of destitution, starvation, 
and squalor. The streets were utterly filthy, as if they 
had not been cleaned for months or years — which was 
probably the case. The disused tram-lines reared up 
two or three feet above the worn road, so that camels, 
donkeys, and pedestrians constantly tripped over them. 
Along the principal streets one had to turn aside, every 
dozen yards or so, to avoid enormous holes. Half- 
crumbled walls, huts, and houses were everywhere 
apparent. The magnificent old mosque which is one 
of the beauties of Damascus was decaying into de- 
crepitude, without any attempt at support or restora- 
tion. 

As for the population, most were in rags, very few 
had boots, about one half wore sandals, and the re- 
mainder went about barefooted. Yet even the des- 
titute Arabs were more attractive than the well-to-do 
Levantines with their frock coats and brown boots 
and straw hats. 

All the poorer Arabs and Syrians looked half starved, 
and we must have passed hundreds of gaunt beggars — 



78 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

men, women, and children. Worst of all were the little 
babies, huddled against the walls and doorways. Ribs 
and bones showed through their wasted bodies, which 
were indescribably thin except where the stomach, 
swollen out by the moistened grain which had been 
their only sustenance, seemed abnormally fat by con- 
trast. So weak were they that they could scarcely cry 
their hunger or hold out a hand in supplication. Arab 
mothers, themselves on the verge of starvation, had 
left them, in the vain hope that Allah would provide. 
And neither Allah nor anybody else took the least no- 
tice, until they were dead. The police then removed 
their small bodies for burial; and more starving mothers 
left more starving babies by the roadside. The Greek 
doctor told me that forty such babies died in Damascus 
each day. 

The next few days were buoyant with expectancy. 
We collected raisins and other foodstuffs, while George 
went backward and forward into the city to com- 
municate with the Druse. We now hoped to leave the 
barracks without especial difficulty. The Austrian 
sentry below, we discovered, remained inside the door- 
way after midnight, so that it would be possible to slip 
down from the window without being seen or heard 
by him. One night we half-hitched our blankets to- 
gether as a test, and found that they would be fully 
strong enough to bear even the weight of H., if tied to 
an iron bedpost. 

A more difficult problem was that of the guard out- 
side our room. There were three blacks who performed 
this sentry duty in turn, two Sudanese and one Sene- 
galese — Sambo, Jumbo, and Hobo, as we called them. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 79 

Jumbo and Hobo were intensely stupid and lazy. They 
spent their night watches in dozing on the floor of the 
corridor. Our door being closed each night, conditions 
would be ideal if either of them were there on escape- 
evening. 

Sambo was more alert. He had been a postal mes- 
senger at Khartoum, and as such spoke a certain amount 
of English. When Turkey entered the war, he told us, 
he had been travelling to Mecca on a pilgrimage, and the 
Turks conscripted him. Twice he had been in prison, 
once because he attempted to desert, and once be- 
cause an Arab prisoner whom he was guarding, escaped. 
Apparently he had learned a lesson from this latter mis- 
fortune, for he never slept when on sentry duty. Ob- 
viously, if he were outside our door on the evening, we 
should have to find some means of dealing with him. 
We sent George to buy chloroform, but he returned 
with the news that none could be found in Damascus. 
Thereupon we made a gag with a piece of pants and a 
chunk of rubber, to be used on Sambo if necessary. 

Then, with these preliminary arrangements settled, 
they tumbled down like a house of cards. We were 
moved to a room on the north side of the building, so 
that a number of arrested Turkish officers might be put 
into our larger apartment. Our first thought, on en- 
tering the new quarters, was for the window. Ten 
thousand curses! It looked on to an open courtyard. 
Two sentries promenaded the yard, which was sur- 
rounded by a brick wall. 

"My dear," said George when he next visited us, "the 
business is lost. It is by all means impossible to quit 
window without observation from Turks." 



8o EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

For hours the Australians and I sought a way out of 
the new difficulty, and sought vainly, for it was George 
whose cunning rescued our plan from the blind alley 
into which it had been driven. He would leave his 
rifle at the top of the back stairway, he said, then come 
to our room and usher us along the corridor, after tell- 
ing the black guard that he was taking us to an officer's 
room (as often happened in the evening). Next he 
would recover his rifle, slip down the stairway to the 
Austrian section of the barracks and, with bayonet 
fixed, lead us out of the side door guarded by an Aus- 
trian sentry. The advantage of the Austrian door was 
that the sentry, seeing a Turkish soldier walking out 
with prisoners, would think he was taking them to the 
railway station, or not think about the matter at all; 
whereas the Turkish guard at the main door would 
have recognized George and known that something 
was wrong. 

George could not take more than three of us, as a 
larger number with only one guard would make even 
the Austrian suspicious. He refused point-blank to 
return to the barracks and repeat the performance, so 
that four of us might go. C. could not come, for per- 
sonal reasons that would not allow him to let his fate 
remain unknown for several months. The party, how- 
ever, was still one too many. With a pack of cards we 
settled the delicate problem of who was to stay behind. 
M. cut lowest, to his bitter disappointment and my 
regret, for he was very plucky and resourceful. 

Once more with a definite plan in view — and ap- 
parently a better one than the last — H., R., and I fixed 
a date for the escape. Having calculated the times of 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 81 

the rising and setting of the moon, and communicated 
with the Druse, we chose the third evening from the 
day of our removal to the new room. 

Meanwhile, we had been treated by no means badly. 
A few nights of irritation accustomed us to the plague 
of bugs, and constant searching and washing kept our 
clothes fairly free from more repulsive vermin. For 
the rest, we passed the days with poker, bridge, and per- 
fecting our plans. We could not grumble at the food, 
for we messed with the Turkish officers, who, while not 
feeding as well as German privates, never actually went 
hungry. 

Indeed, we met with much kindness and considera- 
tion at Damascus. In every prison camp of Turkey 
the officers and guards took their cue from the com- 
mandant. If, as at Afion-kara-Hissar during the reign 
of one Muslum Bey, the commandant was a murderer, 
a thief, and a degenerate, unspeakable outrages were 
committed. If, as at Baranki Barracks, Damascus, 
under Mahmoud Ali Bey, the commandant was good- 
natured, conditions were passable. 

Some of the Turks, in fact, wanted to be too friendly. 
The deputy-commandant invited us into his room one 
evening, and, with his friends sitting around and George 
acting as interpreter, asked for an exposition of Eng- 
land's reasons for taking part in the war. For two 
hours I delivered myself of anti-German propaganda, 
though I could not tell what force remained in my 
arguments after they had passed through the filter of 
George's curious translation. Meanwhile, the deputy- 
commandant looked at his finger-nails and occasionally 
smiled. He was non-committal in expressing his own 



82 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

views; but afterward, when coffee was handed round, 
he declared that the talk had been of the greatest in- 
terest. 

This same officer drove us one afternoon to the beau- 
tiful spot, on a high slope outside the city, where the 
sources of the Seven Rivers are gathered within a space 
of fifty yards. In the scorching heat we undressed 
and bathed in the River Pharpar. 

We had ample evidence of the widespread hatred 
of the Germans throughout Syria, both among civilians 
and soldiers. Turkish soldiers expressed the greatest 
dislike and envy of the Germans, and German soldiers 
expressed the greatest contempt for the Turks. As for 
the Arab officers, they were whole-heartedly pro-British. 
Nahed Effendi Malek, the young Arab adjutant, and 
his friend the Arab quartermaster often visited us when 
no Turkish officers were near. The pair talked the 
most violent sedition. The quartermaster wanted to 
be with his brother, a prisoner at Alexandria. The 
Turks knew this, and once, when in prison for several 
weeks as a political suspect, he had been freed only by 
a liberal distribution of baksheesh among the military 
authorities. Both he and Nahed were kept separate 
from their families while the Turks levied blackmail 
by telling them that the lives of relatives or friends 
would pay forfeit for any breach of loyalty. Like other 
officers of their race, they were now kept expressly from 
the fighting front, because so many Arabs had deserted 
to the British. 

This very barracks, declared Nahed, was full of im- 
prisoned officers whose loyalty the Turks suspected. 
Unless they could bribe their way to a release they 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 83 

might be shut up in one small room for months, unpaid, 
forgotten, and living on such food as their friends pro- 
vided. Then, if their prayers and petitions for a trial 
brought about a courtmartial, they might be acquitted 
and graciously released; but neither reparation for the 
months of captivity nor military pay for the period of 
it would be given. 

Our own room had lately been occupied by a Turkish 
colonel, who shot dead a fellow officer. Assassination 
being a less serious crime than dislike of oppression, 
and the colonel having been an expert juggler with 
military supplies and funds (like so many Turkish 
colonels who bought command of their units as an in- 
vestment in a colossal corporation of Military Graft, 
Incorporated), he delivered sealed envelopes to various 
high officers and officials, and within a week was free. 

Nahed and his friend talked savagely of the hunger 
and misery that ravaged Syria, of the killing and im- 
prisonment of Arab sheikhs, of their hopes of an inde- 
pendent Arab kingdom, of their galling helplessness 
against the Turks and Germans until the British ar- 
rived. 

"But once let the British reach Deraa," said Nahed 
Effendi, "and you will hear of such an uprising as Syria 
and Arabia have never known," — a prediction that was 
to be fulfilled in the following autumn, during General 
Allenby's whirlwind advance. 

Sometimes, instead of confiding their wrongs and 
hatreds, Nahed and his friend would chant Arabian 
songs of love and war, or order George to translate the 
stories and epigrams of Haroun-al-Raschid and other 
Arabian notabilities. Once George substituted a sen- 



84 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

tence of his own for the tale he should have retailed 
for our benefit: 

"My dear, I must go to see my friend. Soon it 
is too late, and my officer say no. Please think of some 
request I perform for you." 

M. laughed, as if in enjoyment at a translated story, 
and H., turning to Nahed, said "kweis kateer" ("very 
good") — two of the dozen Arabic words that he knew. A 
little later I asked for and received permission to send 
George to buy wine for us in the bazaar; and the mon- 
grel interpreter with a " Mille fois merci, mon cher" 
shambled off to see the Druse. 

We realized that it would be very unfortunate for 
little Nahed if we escaped, and we should be sorry in- 
deed to think of him in prison on our account. But it 
was obvious that even if he would, he could not come 
with us, and we certainly dared not confide in him. 

As I lay half awake, early on the morning of May 
15th, I was conscious that an exceptional day had 
dawned. But my drowsy faculties could not produce, 
from the dark room of memory, a negative of what was 
imminent. Then the door opened, and with a clatter 
of mugs and a cry of the German word "Milch" there 
entered an Arab milkman, with his tin bowl slung over 
his shoulder. 

I was alert in an instant. Why, of course, we had 
reached escape day, and we must buy a stock of bis- 
cuits for a journey from this dairyman, whose privilege 
it was to sell us goat's milk, at five piastres a glass, for 
our breakfast. 

But that morning he had brought no biscuits — and this 
was the first of a heart-breaking sequence of obstacles. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 85 

Throughout the day I remained in a state of high 
tension. Yet my principal concern was for the lack of 
self-control shown by George, who walked about with 
shaking knees and unsteady hands and anxious face. 

"For God's sake don't show yourself like that to the 
Turkish officer," said H. 

"My dear, I am not brave, and fortune never visits 
me." His fear was pitiful. 

"Pray for fortune then." 

And George prayed, melodramatically and in all 
solemnity: "God what is in heaven, take us quickly to 
the Arab with horses." 

The thermometer of hope quicksilvered up and down 
every few minutes, throughout the pregnant hours of 
afternoon. For the ninety-ninth time I examined the 
packets of raisins, the bread, and the water bottles. 
For the hundredth time I reviewed the details of our 
plan. 

Between ten p.m. and midnight the Druse was to wait 
by the station, with long headdresses which should be 
disguise enough for the moment, because in the darkness 
a passerby could only see us as silhouetted outlines. 
Soon after ten George was to take H., R., and me 
through the side door, as already described, and lead 
us to the Druse. Then we would slip out of Damascus 
to the spot where an Arab was waiting with the horses. 
We must ride over the plain all night, and hide the next 
day in a certain Druse village, where a hut had been 
prepared for us. We could buy arms in the village. 
We would travel without rest throughout the following 
night and just before dawn reach the mountains outside 
Deraa,when the second Arab was to take back the horses. 



86 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Once in the mountains and among the Druse tribes- 
men an army could scarcely retrieve us. We should 
run more than a little danger from the nomads, but 
these might be friendly, and in any case the guide would 
be our protector and mouthpiece among his fellows. 

For weeks we should be trekking over the mountains 
and desert east of the Turkish lines in the Jordan valley 
and the hardships would be very great. Eventually 
we should arrive among our allies of the Hedjaz. 

Having reached "X" and paid off the Druse, we 
could be taken on board one of the British war ships 
in the Red Sea. We might well meet a raiding party 
of the Emir Feisul's Bedouins near Amman, in which 
case safety would come much sooner, and we might 
travel by aeroplane to the British army in Palestine. 

After dinner the Turkish signal officer invited us to 
his room for coffee. Having no legitimate excuse for 
declining, we chafed under his small talk until nine 
o'clock. Then Nahed Effendi and the quartermaster 
visited us, and again we were forced to sit still and de- 
liver, from time to time, in response to the translations 
of George, a fretful "Yes" or "No" or "Good" or 
"Thank You." 

Ten o'clock came and went, and two suggestions that 
we should retire to bed were brushed aside by our visi- 
tors. By now the Druse would be waiting for us out- 
side the railway station. 

Eleven o'clock arrived, and still Nahed continued to 
draw from his endless store of tales and similes. 

"My officer say," translated George, "that Arabian 
poet compare the breasts of a fellow's beloved to — 
please, my dear, say you must sleep. I shake' and feel 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 87 

I must chuck sponge. Soon it is too late, honest to 
God." 

Ourselves almost desperate with annoyance, we per- 
formed a series of lifelike yawns, and declared our- 
selves to be very tired. Thereupon, to my great relief, 
the Arab officers withdrew, with George in attendance. 

I followed to the doorway, and spoke to George when 
the officers had entered their own room. 

"In three minutes you must come back." 

" I will try. But I have so little courage." 

"Think of the job in Australia, and of the money." 

" Mon cher, I have thought of them all day long, but 
my heart is saying, bourn, bourn! and a voice tells to me 
'Quittez qar But I will come back." 

He did not come back. Before George had left me, 
evil chance sent the Turkish deputy-commandant 
along the passage for one of his rare visits of inspection. 
He looked hard at us; whereupon George's overwrought 
nerves snapped, and he broke down utterly. 

"Aa-ee!" he called. 

Next he grasped instinctively at my arm. Trem- 
bling visibly, he lowered his head and waited. I backed 
into the doorway, while the deputy-commandant took 
George to Nahed's room. 

What followed we could deduce from the noises that 
swept the corridor. George was bullied into a com- 
plete betrayal. We heard furious talk, shouted orders, 
and the unmistakable sound of blows with the bare 
hand. Nahed ran to our room, and counted us fever- 
ishly. Then came the corporal of the guard, puzzled 
and scowling. Finally, six Turkish soldiers replaced 
Jumbo outside the door, which Nahed locked. 



88 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Disgusted with George, disgusted with ourselves, 
and above all disgusted with fate, H. and I paced up and 
down or lay sleepless on the bedstead through hours of 
utter despair. R., the only one of us to make a show of 
indifference, took a pack of cards, played patience, and 
said not a word. 

The door remained locked until the following mid- 
day, when the commandant arrived with Nahed and 
George, both of whom showed reluctance to enter. 

"My officer knew," declared George, with eyes 
averted. "You are to collect the clothes and go to 
railway. They send you to Aleppo I guess." I no- 
ticed that one of his eyes was discoloured and swollen. 

The commandant searched our kits very carefully, but 
confiscated nothing, not even the store of food. Then 
he demanded why we had wanted to escape, and who 
had been helping us. 

"Tell him we refuse to say anything," H. answered. 
And with that he had to be content. 

Surrounded by no fewer than twelve guards, we car- 
ried our few belongings to the railway station and en- 
trucked for Aleppo. The interpreter stayed with the 
Turkish lieutenant in charge of us until the train left. 

We took care not to look at George, but I could sense 
his misery and shamefaced discomfort. At length, for 
the first time since the betrayal, he showed sincerity 
with an agonized sentence in French, spoken from the 
steps of the truck: 

"I am mad with sorrow. I ask pardon." 

Obviously he expected and hoped for an answer, 
but nobody took the least notice. It was as if wc had 
not heard. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 89 

"My officer has beaten me, and he will beat me 
again. My face is big with hurts — see." 

Still no reply. Then, faintly, as the Turkish officer 
called him down from the steps: "I have so little cour- 
age. I ask pardon." 

The appeal went home, and I half turned my head. 
But the bitterness of betrayal was too great, and think- 
ing that a few beatings were not punishment enough, 
I could offer no comfort, and continued to ignore him. 

As the train chugged across Syria toward Aleppo, we 
wondered often what our own punishment would be. 
But still more often I called to mind a futile little figure 
with bent shoulders, a greasy face, an absurdly long 
nose, and an eye that was discoloured and swollen, 
saying, with despair in his voice: "I have so little 
courage. I ask pardon." And I regretted not having 
turned my head to look George in the face and answer 
him. 



CHAPTER V 

THE BERLIN-BAGDAD RAILWAY — AND THE AEROPLANES 
THAT NEVER FLEW 

A soldier out of the combat is not necessarily a soldier 
hors de combat. 

Ambition often translates a great dream into great 
achievement. Misapplied ambition often loses the 
benefits of such achievement. 

Four thousand miles of dislike, distrust, and dis- 
organization separate Berlin from Bagdad. Four 
thousand miles of friendship, and (except for one short 
distance) continuous railway communication join Lon- 
don to Bagdad. 

All of which diverse and disconnected statements 
shall be linked together in the tale of the Tunnel, the 
Tommies, and the Aeroplanes that Never Flew. 

Before the train left Damascus two more prisoners 
joined the party — W., who had been in hospital at 
Nazareth for five months, and P., recently captured 
in the Jordan valley. 

Made desperate by our failure to escape, we were 
ready to try without forethought any impossible plan 
that was suggested between halts, as we journeyed 
toward Aleppo. H. and I decided, if the train slowed 
down, to jump from it and make for the mountains. 

90 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 91 

Then, at evening, we would find the German aero- 
drome and try to steal a machine, chancing such pos- 
sible odds as alert sentries, well-guarded hangars, and 
empty petrol-tanks. Once aboard the aeroplane we 
could fly southeastward to the Palestine front. But the 
train continued at a speed which made any leap from 
it impossible, so that we abandoned the scheme. 

Two rather better opportunities were provided by the 
officer in charge of our guards, a young Turk who was 
fanatical and unbelievably stupid. The party occupied 
two compartments, one containing three prisoners, the 
officer, and a Turkish soldier, and the other the remain- 
ing four prisoners, a corporal, and a third guard. The 
officer paid us not the least attention, whether to guard 
against a possible escape, to provide us with food, or 
even to count his prisoners from time to time. At sun- 
set he turned eastward and murmured his prayers, and 
at odd moments throughout the day, with head on 
breast, he muttered what I supposed to be passages 
from the Koran. Nobody but Allah, Mohammed, and 
his fanatical little self seemed to interest him. 

The fanatic had a basket of bread and dried meat 
for his own needs — but for his own needs only. After 
ten hours of foodlessness we stopped awhile at Horns, 
and in broken Arabic we demanded food. He pointed 
to a man on the platform who was selling bread and 
hard-boiled eggs, and resumed his meditation. We 
left the train without hindrance, and mingled with the 
people who surrounded the hawker. Two of us, at 
least, could have slipped away, with the crowd as 
screen. But the nearest point on the coast was far 
distant, and, with neither compass nor a supply of food, 



92 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

to make the attempt in our uniforms would have been 
madness. 

On this station I got into conversation with a Mar- 
onite woman, who talked of the dreadful conditions in 
her native province of Lebanon. The crops had been 
commandeered, the cedars and the fruit trees cut down 
by the Turks for fuel, the people systematically starved. 
Already thirty per cent, of Lebanon's pre-war popula- 
tion had died of destitution, she declared, including her 
father and her two children. 

"The people of Lebanon perish, and neither God nor 
anybody else helps us." This in a tone of dull hope- 
lessness, as if she were beyond even despair. And even 
as she said it, many a consignment of Syrian and Ana- 
tolian grain was en route for Germany. 

The second chance came at Hamah, where we halted 
at dusk for half an hour. A little restaurant faced our 
compartment, and, still being hungry, we made for it. 
The Turkish officer ordered us to stop, while a guard, 
running from the train, clutched at H.'s arm. H. shook 
him off, like a horse shaking off a fly, said "mungaree" 
(his version of the Arabic for food) and proceeded 
toward the restaurant. The young officer continued to 
protest, but, when we took not the slightest notice, he 
joined us at the buffet, where, for the price of three 
dollars, one could buy a plate of goat's meat and beans, 
with bread and coffee. Afterward, while the Turk 
went outside with four of our number, H., M., and I 
stayed behind to buy bread. 

When we returned to the platform not a guard was 
in sight. Moreover, our train had shunted backward. 
To reach it we should have to walk fifty yards. Ahead 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 93 

of us we could see the little fanatic, stupidly unconscious 
as ever of our location, walking between the rails with 
the remainder of the party. 

" You're the linguist," said H. to me. "Hop back 
quickly and buy all the grub you can find. Get enough 
to last us to the coast/' 

"Twelve loaves of bread, some hard-boiled eggs, and 
some raisins," I demanded of the waiter in the buffet. 

He disappeared into the back room. I waited, un- 
comfortable under the curious glances at my faded uni- 
form. 

"A German aviator," I heard one man tell his woman 
companion; at which I was much relieved, although 
scarcely pleased. 

The waiter could supply only three small loaves and 
a dozen eggs; and with these tied in a bundle I returned 
to H. and M. 

The military guard of the station was at the farther 
end of the platform. To avoid him we had to walk 
along the line, in the direction of our own train. We 
intended to dodge behind some waiting trucks about 
twenty yards ahead, slip over the siding in which they 
stood, and so to open country. 

Then, as we were moving up the line, the adventure 
was made impossible. Two of the guards came running 
toward us. We continued calmly in their direction, 
so that they showed no suspicions, and evidently 
thought we were alone as a result of misunder- 
standing. 

" Saa-seda" said H., blandly, as he offered them 
cigarettes; and this greeting disposed of whatever 
doubts they may have had. Yet the state of fright into 



94 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

which our absence plunged the Turkish officer had the 
effect of a shower-bath upon him. He roused himself 
from the torpor of unintelligent disregard; and for the 
rest of the journey we were never allowed outside the 
carriage. 

Thus, once again, a mad plan fell through at the 
outset; for with no guide, no compass, no water, and the 
necessity of buying more food, the odds would have 
been a hundred to one against our reaching the coast. 
And even if we had reached the coast it was improbable 
that we should have found a sailing-boat waiting to be 
stolen. 

At Aleppo we came upon some Indian prisoners. 
We were trudging along the hot, uneven road from the 
railway station when three white-turbaned figures in 
khaki saluted, from the balcony of a hospital. One 
of them placed a crutch under his left armpit as he 
stood to attention. This simple salute warmed the 
heart, with its reminder that we were not altogether 
outcasts. We returned it with gusto; as did a passing 
German officer, who thought it was meant for him. 

We were taken to an hotel where transient Turkish 
officers halted on their way to Palestine and Mesopo- 
tamia. Fresh from the failure to escape from Damas- 
cus, we were not surprised at never being allowed to 
leave the building. Indeed, I was astonished at not 
being sent to some prison, and presumed — rightly, 
as it turned out — that punishment must be waiting for 
us farther down the line. For the rest, we spent several 
by no means uncomfortable days at Aleppo, helped 
thereto by sight-seeing from the balcony. 

The market-place fronting the street corner below 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 95 

was used as a food bazaar. Each evening Arab 
and Syrian hucksters arrived with flat barrows, or 
erected rickety stalls. Then, from baskets and pan- 
niers, they produced their wares, which they laid out for 
inspection — loaves of bread, bowls of soured milk, 
basins of stew, cooked potatoes, roasted meats, vege- 
tables, cakes, nuts, or lengths of flexible candy. Some 
of them roasted meat or vegetables over metal bars 
placed across a charcoal fire. 

As the crowd began to gather the policemen cir- 
culated among the vendors, looking for such as had not 
paid police baksheesh for their pitch. Having found a 
victim the gendarme would lead him around the corner 
to settle accounts. Afterward the stall-keeper was at 
liberty to trade for the rest of the evening. Any who 
could not or would not pay were hustled from the 
market-place. 

Then, until about midnight, was acted a succession 
of minor comedies, amusing or pathetic. Trial by taste 
was evidently the custom; and since Allah had provided 
hands and mouths, why use forks and spoons? In- 
tending buyers dug their fingers into the steaming 
dishes, pulled out a chunk of meat or a potato, and 
chewed reflectively. Then they either purchased or 
passed on to the next stall, while somebody else stuffed 
a hand into the dish. I traced a few men and women 
who, by tasting meat at one stall, potato at another, 
and bread at a third, must have eaten quite a meal for 
nothing. This was rare, however, for the hucksters 
had an instinct for bona fide buyers, and kicks for such 
as were not. 

Over there is a seller of vegetables who has dodged 



96 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

his police dues, apparently because his ready cash is in- 
sufficient. A gendarme approaches, whereupon he 
picks up his basket, with the wooden box on which it 
rests, and fades into the crowd. When the policeman 
has gone he reappears and resumes business. Twice 
more must he shut up shop, for a quarter of an hour at 
a time. Finally his takings allow him to pay the bribe. 
His wife guards the stall while he confers with the police- 
man round the corner. He reappears, and, no longer 
obliged to shun overmuch attention cries his wares 
loudly and does a roaring trade. 

The candy-barrows are mostly kept by small boys 
comically dignified in apron and fez . Useless to think 
that their youth makes them easy game, for they are 
sharp as pawnbrokers, and can tell in the fraction of a 
second a bad note or coin. Most of them seem to have 
a working arrangement with some gendarme whereby 
if an adult tries to swindle they shriek invectives. The 
gendarme then strolls toward the stall, and the would- 
be cheat wishes he hadn't. 

One or two seedy ruffians hang around the rim of the 
crowd, awaiting the chance of some petty villainy. 
Presently, out of the crush comes a little Syrian girl, 
carrying a bowl of milk. A much-moustached, dirty- 
robed Arab follows her into the entrance of a narrow 
street where he suddenly grabs the milk, drinks it, 
pushes the bowl back into her hands, and strides away. 
The little girl attracts a certain amount of attention by 
shrilling her protests; but the wolfish milk-drinker has 
vanished. A gendarme spectator makes no pretence 
at interference, not having been bribed to protect stray 
children. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 97 

Soon afterward a similar outrage is perpetrated by 
a similar ruffian, who snatches a chunk of meat from 
an old woman's basin of stew. In this case retribution 
comes swiftly and suitably. The Man who Grabs 
Meat has failed to notice that the weak old woman is 
attended by a strong young man, who has lagged be- 
hind to talk to a friend. The strong young man leaps 
at the thief, kicks him in the stomach — hard, knocks 
him down when he doubles up helplessly, and proceeds 
to beat him. The old woman shrieks her venom. The 
gendarme is much amused. 

Through the changing crowd pass the drink-sellers, 
clanging a brass cup against a brass can, but neither 
washing nor rinsing the cup after somebody has drunk 
from it. From time to time a stall-keeper slips away 
for a glass of arak in the near-by cafe, while a wife or a 
friend guards his barrow. 

Between eleven o'clock and midnight most of the 
traders run out of stock. They pack up their kit, and 
before leaving bargain with each other for an exchange 
of surplus foodstuffs for personal use — two loaves for a 
dish of vegetables, a can of milk for three slices of meat. 
The streets empty, the cries cease, the gendarmes dis- 
appear with their baksheesh; and we retire to join the 
little things that hop and crawl in our bed. 

Always there was something to distract us. A Mo- 
hammedan official of the Indian Postal Service, for 
example, provided much interest. With only a fez 
differentiating his uniform from that of most native 
officers of the Indian Army, we accepted him at first 
as a fellow-prisoner. But when, at table, he asked 
leading questions about the Palestine operations, H. 



9 8 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

winked at me and fingered his lips as a signal. We 
took the hint, and answered vaguely. 

"Don't like the look of the little blighter," said H., 
after dinner; "let's watch him." 

He was worth watching. Every day, we found, he 
walked about the streets of Aleppo without a guard. 
Moreover, he was living by himself in a comfortable 
room. While this exceptional treatment of a prisoner 
did not prove treachery, the circumstantial evidence 
was fairly damning. We became as unopened clams 
when he talked to us. 

This was the right attitude, for later, when at a con- 
centration camp, we heard of an Indian official who was 
an out-and-out traitor. Sometimes he was at full 
liberty in Constantinople, sometimes he talked in rail- 
way trains to newly captured prisoners, sometimes he 
talked with them in hospitals. Once, at a hospital at 
Mosul, he was placed next to a wounded officer taken in 
a recent battle. His assumed complaint was influenza. 
Yet he was given full diet, and his temperature remained 
normal, while he lay in bed and asked questions about 
the Mesopotamian campaign. 

A prisoner of war in the Orient, far more than the 
traveller, senses the spirit of his surroundings. Tem- 
porarily he is of the Orient. Of necessity his captors 
regard him as somebody more intimate than the tran- 
sient Westerner who, while moving freely among them, 
lives according to Western custom and tradition; and 
of necessity the man who is in the power of Easterns, 
and forced to live according to Eastern customs, is 
more likely to realize the mental attitude whereby the 
crooked road is chosen in preference to the straight, 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 99 

to-morrow never comes, anything unexpected may hap- 
pen at any time, and — to repeat an illustration of my 
friend Jean Willi the dragoman — a man may get mar- 
ried in the morning, and be a solitary fugitive for his 
life in the evening. 

So it was with us. The continuity of impressions 
and experiences reacted on me till I forgot to remember 
that I was an ordinary Englishman, and became as 
fatalistic and unsurprised as the Turks and Arabs them- 
selves. Somewhere or other, I knew, we should be 
punished for having wanted to escape. Of what the 
punishment might consist we guessed nothing, except 
that it would probably find us quite unprepared. Mean- 
while, it was of absorbing interest to sit on the balcony 
at Aleppo, and watch the crowd in the bazaar. 

On leaving Aleppo we knew neither the next stage 
of the journey nor our ultimate destination; and we 
were content that it should be so, for a future that is 
certain to be unpleasant is better indefinite than defi- 
nite. 

This time our escort consisted of two gendarmes and 
two soldiers. First we were herded into a third-class 
compartment, windowless and filthy. Already, be- 
fore we arrived, unwashed and unkempt peasants had 
crowded into it; so that our party of eleven was able to 
occupy seven seats only. One of the gendarmes, who 
could murder French, advised us never to place our few 
belongings out of reach. 

"Or," said he, "we meet darkness and — pouf! — 
everything vanish." 

We liked the looks of neither the carriage nor the fel- 
low-passengers, and thought how much more pleasant 



ioo EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

a goods truck would be. R. and I persuaded a gendarme 
to take us to the office of the station commandant in 
the hope of being allotted different quarters. The 
commandant was polite, but pretended that he could 
offer nothing better. 

Then, as we passed along the platform, I saw a clean, 
covered-in truck, with a few German soldiers inside it. 
One man leaned idly against the entrance, and him I 
asked politely if, since there was so much room to spare, 
they could lend us a corner. 

" Ausgeschlossen!" he growled. "Wir wollen keine 
Englander ." 

We were about to move on, when — "Was gibt'sV 
called a Feldwebel as he stepped from the truck. 

I explained that seven British officers, two of them 
wounded, longed for floor-space, so that they would not 
be herded with odorous Turks. 

"Perhaps we can manage it," said the Feldwebel. 

"What's Paris like now?" he asked suddenly, and 
went on to explain that before the war he was a bank 
clerk there. With one eye on the space in the truck, 
I admitted to having lived for a time on the rive gauche , 
discussed peace-time and war-time Paris, and even — 
for one will put up with a lot to avoid travelling in a 
Turkish third-class carriage — listened patiently to the 
German's reminiscences of a love affair with a French 
singer. 

This patience was rewarded. He took a referendum 
of his five companions; and all, except the surly brute to 
whom I had first spoken, agreed to cede half the truck. 
The Feldwebel asked permission of a German major 
to ask us inside, and the major agreed. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 101 

"But only because you happen to be fellow- 
Europeans," he explained, "while the Turks are not." 

A small bribe to the gendarme, and we moved thank- 
fully from the Turkish compartment. There was room 
enough for all, prisoners and guards, to lie on the floor 
of the truck, so that by comparison we travelled de 
luxe. The Germans were friendly; and the Feldwebel, 
after I had pretended to be interested in more tales of 
his affaires de cceur, offered us a supply of tea, with the 
loan of a spirit-stove for boiling it. 

So, with poker and talk, we travelled across Asia 
Minor. On three of the next four evenings a certain 
amount of excitement was produced by Turkish soldiers' 
attempts to desert when the train halted. They ran 
toward the hills, sometimes fired upon and sometimes 
chased. Several were captured, several got away and 
went to swell the huge total of brigands. 

In that part of 191 8 the number of brigands all over 
Turkey was enormous. Hundreds of thousands de- 
serted from the army, and of these scores of thousands 
took to the mountains and wild places, there to become 
robbers. Travelling on foot, on horseback, or on don- 
key-back across Anatolia was unsafe in the highest 
degree. In every fastness one would be certain to meet 
a band of armed ruffians, destitute and utterly merci- 
less, who would cheerfully kill for the sake of a pair of 
boots or a shirt. More than a few German soldiers 
who had walked a mile or two from the beaten track 
were killed by brigands. Many of the gendarmes sent 
to deal with the robber band were found dead, with 
their heads battered in. Many others were hand-and- 
glove with them and gave information of possible 



io2 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

plunder. Sometimes a gang would descend on a vil- 
lage, kill a few inhabitants as a warning to the others, 
and proceed to steal everything worth the stealing be- 
fore they retired. 

We detrained on the eastern side of the Taurus 
Mountains and were transferred to the narrow-gauge 
line that traversed the Taurus tunnel before the broad- 
gauge railway was completed. For eight hours, on a 
swaying little train with miniature engine, we moved 
through the tunnel's half-light, with an occasional in- 
terval of sunlight at gaps between the mountains. 

The great Taurus tunnel was the solution of the worst 
obstacle to the Berlin-Bagdad Railway. With Serbia 
overrun and Bulgaria and Turkey as Germany's pup- 
pets, the line from Berlin to Constantinople was 
straightforward. Already in 191 5 the Anatolian Rail- 
way linked Constantinople to Konia. At the eastern 
end of the Berlin-Bagdad chain the line from Bagdad — 
once Turkey should have regained it — could be ex- 
tended across the desert to Mosul; and the stretch of 
country from Mosul to Aleppo would offer no difficul- 
ties. Between Konia and the line from Aleppo, how- 
ever, was the natural barrier of the Taurus Mountains. 

The rock stratum in the Taurus is among the hardest 
in the world. For many months it resisted all ordinary 
drills. The German engineers caused various special 
drills to be made; and then, after infinite labour and 
experiment, began boring slowly through the rock. The 
natural difficulties — precipices, steep slopes, chasms, and 
gorges — were tremendous. Nobody who has passed 
through the hollowed rock can deny that the tunnel is 
a magnificent piece of engineering, especially the sus- 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 103 

pension bridge across a giant gorge on the western 
slope. 

Trains began running through the Taurus, along the 
broad-gauge line, just before the Armistice; and the 
Berlin-Bagdad Railway, including this wonderful tun- 
nel, then became the London-Bagdad Railway Al- 
ready the rails stretch eastward to Mosul, while the 
westward rails from Bagdad are fast moving from 
Samarra to Mosul. These, when completed, will be the 
last links in a railway chain from Boulogne to Bagdad. 
When — and if — a Channel tunnel is constructed the chain 
will reach, without a break, from London to Bagdad. 

Throughout the war this work on the Anatolian Rail- 
way was largely done by British and Indian soldiers, 
mostly from among the survivors of the captured garri- 
son of Kut-el-Amara. With them were a few German 
technicians, some Turkish guards, and many Turkish 
labourers. As workmen the Turks were hopeless, ex- 
cept when set to tasks that required no intelligence; 
and even then they shirked. The Tommies, who were 
better paid and fed by the Germans than were the pris- 
oners working for the Turks, established a curious 
ascendancy. When it suited them they did four times 
the work of the Turks. They had initiative, they could 
be trusted. It was not long before some of them were 
in charge of Turkish gangs. Several filled positions of 
importance, with good salaries and plenty of freedom. 

Having left the tunnel and halted for a few hours at 
Belamedik, we were met by groups of these prisoner- 
officials eager for news of the war. They wore civilian 
clothes, furnished by the Dutch Legation at Constan- 
tinople. Such as had clean collars and hats were 



io 4 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

greeted respectfully with the title of ejfendi by the 
Turkish labourers. One Tommy — a Glasgow ware- 
houseman — had charge of all the office staff, with Greek 
clerks under him. Another — an Australian — was act- 
ually paymaster of this section of the construction de- 
partment. Thousands of dollars passed through his 
hands each week, and the German officials trusted him 
implicitly. It was an extraordinary position — British 
prisoners of war, in the wildest part of Anatolia, as 
valued officials on the Berlin-Bagdad Railway. 

From Belamedik we proceeded to Bosanti, where, in 
those days, the broad-gauge line ended and the narrow- 
gauge line began. There we stayed for a night and a 
morning. At Bosanti, also, there was a band of British 
prisoners, some of whom took us to their hut and de- 
manded the latest war news. At that time we had 
little that was good to tell. The German drive toward 
Amiens and Paris was in full swing, the Italians had 
been badly beaten on the Piave, the tonnage sunk by 
submarines was enormous. Our one bright item of 
news was that thousands of Americans were pouring 
into France daily. This greatly surprised the isolated 
prisoners, who, from what they had been told by the 
Germans or had read in the Turkish papers, thought 
that no American troops could have arrived on the 
Western front. 

Having distracted the guards' attention by giving 
them cocoa in a far corner of the hut, the Tommies 
revealed a plan of escape. A party of five — two Austra- 
lians, two Englishmen, and a French petty officer from 
a captured submarine — had built a collapsible boat. 
In three weeks' time they would apply for twenty-four 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 105 

hours' rest from work, a privilege allowed by the Ger- 
man supervisors every three months. Carrying the 
boat in sections, and enough food for a fortnight, they 
would then slip away and begin tramping toward the 
coast, near Mersina. They expected to be walking 
for about ten days. Afterward they would assemble 
the boat at night and put to sea, in the hope of either 
being picked up by an Allied vessel or rowing to Cyprus. 
Five months had passed in building the boat, the work 
being done inside the hut at odd moments, sometimes 
by day and sometimes by night, but always with a man 
on the look-out for intruders. Tools, strips of metal, 
and a huge sheet of canvas had been smuggled out of 
the German workshops. 

After making sure that the guards were unsuspicious, 
an Australian lifted the tip of a plank beneath his bed, 
and extracted one of the steel ribs. It was beautifully 
made, with folding joint in the centre and clasp and 
socket at either extremity. He also produced a com- 
pass and a revolver bought from a friendly Austrian. 
Both these articles would be necessary, the compass 
because without it they would be unable to follow the 
road, and the revolver because they would be certain 
to meet brigands. 

One can imagine the determination and perseverance 
that made possible these long hours of secret work on the 
collapsible boat, during months of designing, of filching 
the required materials, of odd-moment construction 
under great difficulty, always with the fear of discovery. 

I wish it were possible to tell of their success. About 
a month after we left Bosanti they slipped away, ac- 
cording to plan. Carrying the boat in sections, besides 



106 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

food and the oars, they walked in night marches across 
the mountains and down the wild slopes fronting the 
coast. Three times they met brigands, but the re- 
volver enabled them to bluff their way through. 

And then, when already within sight of the sea, a 
gendarme found them. Four of the plucky five were 
captured, while the fifth managed to hide in a cleft be- 
tween two rocks with the complete framework of the 
boat. That night he dragged it down to the deserted 
part of the beach. On the following night he pieced it 
together. He put to sea, and for eight hours made a 
desperate effort to leave the coast. But the shoreward 
currents were too strong for him, and the weak little 
craft drifted back. He was recaptured, and sent to 
join the other adventurers in prison. 

In the morning, while waiting for our train, we 
watched the Tommies at work. Six aeroplanes were 
on their way to Palestine, and the prisoners were told 
to transfer them to the small-gauge railway. The men 
seemed listless and unhasteful as they carried the ma- 
chines to a secluded siding for the reloading, but I was 
puzzled to find that when they began packing the aero- 
plane sections on the small trucks they showed keen- 
ness and even enthusiasm. In the distance we could 
see them grouped around each truck in turn, as they 
worked steadily throughout the morning. 

"You always as keen in handling Hun war material ?" 
asked H. of a burly Londoner of the old Regulars, who 
strolled toward us from the siding. 

"Sometimes we are, sir; sometimes we ain't." 

"You couldn't have done a better morning's work 
in a munitions factory at home." 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 107 

"That's right. We done a good mornin's work." 

" But these are Hun aeroplanes, man. What the " 

"As yew remark, sir, they're 'Un airerplanes. But I 
doubt if they'll ever fly." 

Then we guessed. He amplified the guesses with 
details. 

"Yus; we does er bit er wreckin' — sabbertage, as yer 
might say. We carry things across to that 'ere sidin', 
and nobody can say as we don't bee-ave beeyewtiful till 
we gets there. Then we open er box er two, see what's 
inside, and proceed according to reggerlations. Crim- 
ernul, I calls it. . . . 

"That 'ere sidin's useful place. Aht er the way, yer 
know. The Boches don't go there. 'Course, if any 
Boches er near, we resoom ligitimite operations till 
they've 'opped it. Turks? We don't let 'em see 
neither if we can 'elp it. Wuncertwice Turkish askas 
Ve seen us at play, but they only larf. They 'ate the 
'Uns a blurry sight more'n we do. Why, I remember 
when a coupler Turks 'elped in the good work one morn- 
in'. 

"Guns and airerplanes is 'andiest," he continued. 
"Yer see, when we 'ave the breech-block uv a gun it 
don't need long to take aht some gadget or other, ac- 
cordin' as the gunners with us sez. Airerplanes we 
attack mostly on the longeerongs — those ribs o' wood 
that runs dahn the length uv the body, ain't they? 
English pilot '00 passed dahn the line some months 
ergo giv' us the tip. 'Course, we give the other parts 
a bit uv attention — wires and sechlike. . . . 

-"No, it don't seem likely as those things over there'll 
fly fer a long time." 



108 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

It certainly didn't seem likely. Besides ripping open 
the fuselage fabric and cutting some of the longerons, 
the Tommies had hacked at the struts and clipped some 
bracing wires. They had prised open the wooden 
cases, and, before replacing the covers, had snapped 
spars, bent elevators and rudders, and been generally 
unpleasant to the planes. Similar wrecking was being 
done, in greater or lesser degree, at Belamedik and 
other points on the railway where prisoners were forced 
to work. 

The ill-treatment of those six aeroplanes at Bosanti 
had a peculiar sequel. When the British entered 
Nazareth (the Turco-German headquarters in Palestine) 
during General Allenby's final advance, they captured 
most of the staff documents. Among the aviation 
papers was a letter from the O. C. German Flying Corps 
on that front to Air Headquarters in Germany, com- 
plaining bitterly about the bad packing and the bad 
handling in transit of aeroplanes sent to Palestine. As 
an instance it mentioned these very machines (my 
comparison of dates and details established that 
point) — single-seater scouts of the Fals type — and 
declared that not one of them was fit to be assembled 
for flying. Enclosed was a photograph of some queer- 
looking debris that had once been a wing. The protest 
ended with a request that the men who packed the six 
craft should be punished. 

Boches are Boches, but Justice is Justice; and with 
memories of what I saw at Bosanti, I hope that the 
packers were not punished. 

Having waved good-bye to these men who, though 
prisoners, were helping the British armies so effectively, 



EASTERN NIGHTS-AND FLIGHTS 109 

we passed on toward Konia. And even as we moved 
westward from Bosanti the Aeroplanes That Never 
Would Fly moved eastward, through the Taurus tunnel 
that never would be a link in a great chain of railways 
from Berlin to Bagdad. 



CHAPTER VI 

CUTHBERT, ALFONSO, AND A MUD VILLAGE 

If, at midnight, you- were comfortably asleep in a 
railway carriage, and some Turkish guards dragged 
you out of it and led you along a puddled track to a 
mud village in the most god-forsaken part of Anatolia, 
while the skies rained their damnedest on you and your 
one spare shirt, you might he annoyed. Possibly you 
would cry: "To hell with the Turks 1" 

Such, at any rate, was H/s comment, shouted at 
intervals every few seconds, while we watched the 
train move Constantinople-ward, leaving us at a small 
village called Alukeeshla. 

Cuthbert and Alfonso (as we named the two soldiers 
who brought us from Bosanti) had told us we were going 
to Afion-kara-Hissar. So we went to Alukeeshla. Be- 
ing unable to read or write, they failed to notice that 
the composite ticket given them for seven prisoners and 
two guards was valid only as far as this village. Their 
surprise was therefore as great as ours when the con- 
ductor turned the whole party out of the train. Cer- 
tainly, said he, while reading a paper produced by 
Cuthbert, we were bound for Afion-kara-Hissar; 
but, according to these written instructions, there was 
to be an indefinite halt at Alukeeshla. It was 
typical of Turkish official methods — guards not know- 
no 



EASTERN NIGHTS—AND FLIGHTS in 

ing what must be done with the prisoners under their 
charge. 

Cuthbert woke the sleepers, and began throwing 
luggage on to the platform. In his flurry he dropped 
a kit-bag on W.'s badly wounded arm. The sight of 
W. in pain, following upon our many discomforts and 
annoyances, sent H. berserk. "To hell with the 
Turks!" he yelled, then stepped one pace backward, 
swung a long leg, and shot his size eleven foot at Cuth- 
bert. The kick lifted the greasy little guard from the 
floor, and sent him hurtling through the door of the com- 
partment, outside of which he fell on all fours. 

Far from showing resentment he was obviously 
cowed. Having picked himself up he asked us, hum- 
bly enough, to leave the train. Not wishing to make 
a bad situation worse by inviting violence, we complied, 
while trying to soothe H., who continued to consign 
all Turks to flaming perdition. Evidently Cuthbert 
and Alfonso thought they had to deal with a madman, 
and kept out of his way. 

Nobody in Alukeeshla had heard of our existence; 
and no quarters, of course, had been allotted. The 
wretchedness of our midnight search in a mud village 
for somewhere to rest was so complete as to be humor- 
ous; and as we trudged through the rain and the dark- 
ness, and fell into the deep puddles that filled every 
hole in the narrow, badly kept street, we laughed from 
sheer misery, so that the guards must have thought we 
were now all mad. 

We disturbed the inmates of four hovels before finding 
the two-roomed building that served as gendarmerie 
headquarters. Clearly, the policeman whom Cuth- 



ii2 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

bert then roused from his sleep on the floor of the front 
room disliked us, and above all disliked going out into 
the night. After grumbling and protesting for five 
minutes he lit a lantern, scowled his ugliest, and led 
the party through more puddles to a barn. With 
many a creak the door of it was unlocked by means of 
a rusty key. 

Three sorry scarecrows rose up and blinked at the 
lantern, then sank down again resignedly. The at- 
mosphere was indescribably musty and dusty. Re- 
volting garbage of every species covered the earthen 
floor. The wooden walls were clotted with dirt : some- 
thing with wings could be heard flitting about near the 
high roof. The three prostrate scarecrows were dis- 
gusting, not because of their rags and their filth, but 
because of their general suggestion of bestiality. 

"The prison," explained the gendarme grandilo- 
quently, as he waved his hand and moved toward the 
door. 

Now Cuthbert and Alfonso shared our indignation 
at the dumping of British officers into such a place, for 
it would be their duty to stay with the said officers. 
They protested volubly, but the gendarme shrugged 
his shoulders, and said not a word as he half opened the 
door. Thereupon H., still far from calm, grabbed his 
shoulder, spun him backward, and began explaining the 
situation in lurid Australian. 

An inspiration was given me by the sight of W.'s bald 
head. W., although a second lieutenant, was a very 
old man — in the neighbourhood of forty, I believe. He 
looked venerable enough to be a temperance lecturer, 
although as a matter of fact he was a first-rate fellow. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 113 

Knowing the Turkish reverence for the higher military 
ranks, I pointed to the bald patch on his head and said, 
"kaimakam!" (colonel), then indicated the unpleas- 
ant surroundings as if in protest against the indignity 
of putting a colonel in such a place. 

The policeman, already in fear of H.'s violence, was 
obviously of opinion that a kaimakam, even an English 
one, should have better quarters. With a "haidee-git!" 
to the guards he led us back into the rain, and so to the 
gendarmerie. There he woke the police officer and 
explained our presence. Fortunately the officer was too 
drowsy to read our papers for proof of the presence of 
a kaimakam. Finally, at his orders, the gendarme took 
us to a room on the first floor of a two-story mud build- 
ing. It was dirty and utterly bare; but there, at any 
rate, we had privacy. We laid out claims to floor- 
space and fell asleep, while Alfonso remained on guard 
by the door. 

That little room in a mud hut was the home for ten 
days of seven British officers and two Turkish guards. 
Side by side, and with bodies touching each other, there 
was just space enough for eight people to lie on the 
floor. Already, when we arrived, one could sense the 
presence of Cuthbert and Alfonso without seeing or 
hearing them; and with each washless day their natu- 
ral odour became more and more intensive. 

We had nothing to read, and — worst misfortune of 
all — somebody had left our pack of playing-cards in 
the train. We wandered round the walls like beasts in 
a cage. 

Nobody in the village knew or cared why we were 
there, or what was to happen to us. We could only 



ii 4 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

surmise that this was the punishment for the plot to 
escape from Damascus. 

Cuthbert took our papers into the village on the 
morning after arrival, but returned at midday with no 
information and many shoulder shrugs. Although 
none of us knew Turkish we understood enough to 
realize that if the matter of obtaining instructions were 
left to this stupid illiterate we might stay in the village 
for ever. 

A council of war decided that I, as being the linguist, 
and W., as being the most imposing of us, with his bald 
head, his bushy moustache, and his South African rib- 
bons, should drag Cuthbert into the presence of what- 
ever officials we could find, and make ourselves a plu- 
perfect nuisance until we were sent away. 

"Commandant!" I said, going toward the door, this 
word being common to most languages. 

"Yassak!" (forbidden) said Cuthbert, barring the 
way. 

"Commandant! Come!" I insisted, brushing him 
aside. 

He was ready to yell for help when Alfonso came 
forward as an unexpected ally, and persuaded Cuth- 
bert that it would be better to let us try to clear up the 
situation. He led us to the station, where, with a 
French-speaking Armenian in tow as interpreter, we 
forced our way into the military commandant's office. 

The commandant — a slight, dapper bimbashi — 
claimed to be desolated at our unfortunate position. 
But what could he do? he inquired. Only yesterday 
he had not heard of our existence, and then — clack! — 
we arrived without warning in this Anatolian village. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 115 

Doubtless, if we waited a week or so, the authorities 
would send orders for a transfer to some prison camp. 
Meanwhile, he would gladly help us in any way possible, 
except give us food or allow us to take walks or move 
us into a better house or, in fact, do anything that I 
suggested. Twenty minutes of argument and bluster 
was necessary before W. and I could even induce the 
soft-spoken hypocrite to telegraph to Bosanti for in- 
structions about our disposal. 

Next day, when I took Cuthbert to the station for 
news, no reply had come. Nor was there any message 
on the third morning. Ten o'clock of the morning 
became known as "commandant time," so that on the 
fourth day the guards took the visit as a matter of 
course, Cuthbert showing his watch byway of reminder. 
The bimbashi, worried by our importunities, took to 
dodging from his office when he saw us coming; but 
always we waited until he returned, and talked in- 
sistently until he promised to send yet another tele- 
gram. He showed surface politeness, and never uttered 
threats; which in any case would have been more or 
less futile, for the fighting force of the village comprised 
but one police lieutenant and four gendarmes. 

We had arrived hungry, and we continued hungry. 
The law of supply and demand, as applied to eggs, to- 
gether with the local brand of profiteer, was the cause. 
On the first morning a bearded peasant visited the hut 
with a basket of hard-boiled eggs, which he sold at the 
current rate of two and a half piastres each. Next day, 
when it became known in the village that the prisoners 
were buying eggs, the rate was four piastres each. After- 
ward it leaped to five, and next to seven and a half 



n6 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

piastres. Finally, the supply of eggs all but gave out. 
It was then possible to buy only one apiece every morn- 
ing, whereat we became more hungry than ever, for 
eggs were our mainstay. 

The commandant had given reluctant permission for 
each prisoner to buy one small loaf of bread a day at 
the military rate of two and a half piastres a loaf. For 
the rest, we managed to supplement the bread and eggs 
with an occasional supply of figs or raisins bought in 
the village bazaar as I returned from my importuning 
of the military commandant. 

These fruits were shown in open baskets on crazy 
little stalls, side by side with stale bread, bad sausages 
and meat, nuts, cotton materials, primitive haberdash- 
ery, rock-salt, rank butter, dusty milk, and the thou- 
sand and one other articles that jostle each other in the 
village bazaars of Anatolia. It being summer, myr- 
iads of flies buzzed around and settled on the dried 
fruits. The figs and raisins, therefore, could not be 
eaten unless washed carefully or boiled. Fortunately 
we possessed a cooking pot, given by the Tommies at 
Bosanti; and a ruffian who lived below us sold charcoal 
at the rate of ten piastres for a quantity just sufficient 
to burn for half an hour. 

At its best, the crowded room was so stuffy as to be 
oppressive. When charcoal fumes were added to the 
summer closeness the atmosphere became unbearable. 
Another drawback that prevented much cooking was 
the scarcity of water. We were given just enough to 
drink; but any surplus, for washing or boiling purposes, 
had to be bought. Usually one bottle of water sufficed 
for the morning toilet of two of us. Cuthbert and Al~ 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 117 

fonso remained unworried by the shortage. They 
never washed. 

Nerve-edging irritation will ever link itself to an 
enforced companionship from which there is no es- 
cape, however temporary; and when repulsive sur- 
roundings are the milieu for such propinquity the ir- 
ritation is akin to madness. The reek, the vermin, 
the heat, the hunger, the confined space, the dirt, and 
the depression combined to stab our sensibilities, so 
that by the third day we almost hated each other, in- 
dividually and collectively. 

We could obtain no brush, no soap, no broom. The 
little den grew dirtier and dirtier, the floor became more 
and more littered, the guards were smellier and smellier. 
Cramped and intensely ennuied, we paced in criss-cross 
fashion around the twelve square yards of floor-space, 
getting in each other's way and brooding bitterly. Of 
outdoor exercise there was only the daily visit to the 
commandant; and but one other man was allowed to 
walk to the station with me each morning. 

A word, a suggestion, or a nudge was enough to pro- 
voke loud disputes. Every now and then heated words 
only stopped short of blows because all realized that 
the anger had been sired, not by bad feeling, but by 
disgusting circumstances, and that a fight would be 
utterly futile. Worst of all, as most prisoners in Turkey 
must have realized, was the galling subjection to men 
such as Cuthbert and Alfonso — semi-civilized, alto- 
gether unintelligent, and regulating their actions by the 
crudest of instincts and axioms. 

Only one of us, old W., remained reasonable; and 
he had the greatest cause for irritation. His wounded 



u8 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

arm, which had not received proper treatment in the 
Turkish hospital at Nazareth, became badly inflamed 
as a result of the terrible conditions. Yet he never 
once complained, nor did he take part in the con- 
stant quarrels. Looking back, I can realize that his 
fine example was the sole redeeming feature of those 
miserable days in the mud village. 

On one point only did we all agree. "Wish some of 
the pretty boys who sport their staff tabs in Cairo could 
be here," said H., and there followed a chorus of hearty 
assent. 

"How about *X\?" he continued, mentioning the 
name of one of the rudest staff officers who ever sat in a 
swivel chair. The five aviators among us grinned at 
the thought of having him to ourselves in the tiny 
room, far away from the list of postings and from Regu- 
lations Governing the Promotion of Officers. This 
happy thought almost reconciled us to the discomfort. 

Always it rained. How it rained! The yard below 
our window was oozy with mud, and the veiled women 
who were our neighbours lifted their robes high as they 
buried their thick ankles into the slush. Three of them, 
with an old man, a boy, and three infants, lived in 
a two-roomed hovel that faced our building. Other 
dwellers in their hut were a donkey, a dog, and several 
hens. Two of the women took ostentatious care to 
draw their yashmaks closer whenever a prisoner showed 
himself at the window; but the third, rather less unpre- 
possessing than the others, was less careful to protect 
her face from the gaze of the infidels. Beyond the yard 
was a stretch of flat mud dotted with squat, ugly build- 
ings. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 119 

It was an Australian — I forget which one — who dis- 
covered by accident an antidote for the state of un- 
utterable boredom and depression which was over- 
whelming us. He had lived in the district which for a 
time was the hunting ground of the Kelly gang, and he 
retold the vivid melodrama, as told to him by older peo- 
ple who had been spectators, of the bushranger brothers 
who wore armour and robbed so successfully, daringly, 
and incredibly. By the time we had listened, thrilled 
by wonder, to the tale of the Kellys' last great stand 
against a large force of police, with a burning house as 
background, what would have been another miserable 
evening had passed in tense interest. 

Afterward we made full use of this means to forget- 
fulness. Each afternoon and evening somebody de- 
livered himself of choses vues or choses entendues. H. 
told of his wanderings in Fiji; R. of sheep-farming in 
Queensland, I was able to relate some early-war ob- 
servations on the Swiss-German frontier, in connection 
with German espionage. Old W. possessed both the 
Queen's and King's South African decorations, and for 
many years after the war in which he gained them had 
served in the Cape Mounted Rifles. His yarns of dia- 
mond-field days before Kimberley was made respectable 
by the De Beers monopoly, of Mafeking and the Vaal, 
of the Boer tribal treks, and of early Rhodesia filled 
many an empty hour in the hut at Alukeeshla. 

When pre-1914 reminiscences ran dry, most phases 
of the war were described from personal experience. 
M. and H. had fought on Gallipoli as troopers; R. had 
flown in the Sinai Desert campaign; W. had been at 
Ypres and Neuve Chapelle in 191 5; I had flown over the 



i2o EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Somme battles in the days before the Royal Flying 
Corps had been provided with machines designed for 
warfare, instead of for inherent stability coupled with 
inherent unsuitability for fighting Fokkers, Halber- 
stadts, and Rolands on equal terms. 

Even Alfonso contributed to the time-killing narra- 
tives. We were discussing the war's origin, and some- 
body mentioned Sarajevo. "Ya Sarajevo!" he said, 
pointing to his chest, then plunged into a whirlpool of 
unintelligible talk. He knew a few German words, but 
mostly he spoke in Turkish or in what was either Ser- 
bian or some Bosnian dialect. I failed to gather whether 
he said he was a native of Bosnia or had merely lived 
there. It was clear, however, that he had been at 
Sarajevo when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was 
murdered, and had seen the deed. Alfonso's excited de- 
scription, containing here and there a word I could 
understand, reminded me, incongruously enough, of 
Marinetti's Futurist "verse," which I had heard recited 
by the poet himself at a London night club in 191 3. 
Said Alfonso: — 

" Kronprinz— jabber jabber jabber — Sarajevo — 
Jabber jabber jabber — automobil— 
Jabber — Pouf! pouf I pouf! pouf! poujl — 
Kronprinz automobil halt bourn I — 
Jabber jabber jabber — Kronprinz aa-eel — 
Damen aa-eel aa-eel — jabber jabber — aa-eel — 
Jabber jabber jabber jabber jabber jabber" 
Lifting his arm as if aiming with a revolver. 
We passed a vote of thanks to Alfonso, together with 
a cigarette and a fig. 
The departure from the mud village was as absurd 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 121 

as the rest of our experiences in it. On my ninth visit 
to him the commandant announced with pride that he 
had arranged for us to leave by the evening train, and 
that the station-master at Bosanti would leave an empty 
truck for us. 

Twenty minutes before the train arrived we trudged 
through the rain to the station, carrying our parcels of 
disreputable kit. All three gates leading to the plat- 
form were guarded by sentries, who offered to bayonet 
any one who tried to pass without papers stamped by 
the local gendarmerie. To each sentry in turn Cuth- 
bert explained frantically who we were and what the 
commandant had said, only to be met with an invari- 
able " Yassak!" and a fingering of the rifle. 

The bimbashi himself was absent, and so was the 
Armenian interpreter — the only other person, appar- 
ently, who knew our orders. Alfonso, despatched to 
the commandant's house, returned with the news that 
he could not be found. We stood in the rain puffing 
at damp cigarettes and cursing. H. returned to his old 
refrain, "To hell with the Turks!", to the great wonder 
of the tatterdemalion men and boys gathered round us. 

When the train steamed away from Alukeeshla, tak- 
ing, no doubt, the empty truck reserved for us, we 
startled the guards and sentries with yells of uncon- 
trollable laughter. 

M. and I opened next morning's visit to the bimbashi 
with bitter protests, but had to end it in helpless ac- 
quiescence before his suave lies. He had given strict 
orders that the sentries were to let us pass, he pretended, 
and they would be punished severely for their failure to 
do so. ^Meanwhile, he was charmed that we were to 



122 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

accept the hospitality of the village for one day longer. 
He himself would be present to see us off by the next 
train that same evening. 

For once the commandant kept his promise. He led 
us to the station himself. But this time no accommo- 
dation had been provided for us on the train. The 
trucks were full of Germans, the first- and second-class 
carriages of Turkish officers, the third-class carriages of 
Turkish soldiers. As it would be difficult to crowd the 
Turkish officers and impossible to dislodge any Germans, 
the only alternative was to clear out some of the Turkish 
privates. 

The bimbashi selected a carriage, entered it, and 
ordered its occupants to descend to the platform. There 
were only nine of us, with the guards, while the soldiers 
numbered more than forty. Yet the bimbashi turned 
them all out. He hurled their packs through the open 
windows, and by candlelight drove them before him to 
the doorway. Some, who were reluctant to leave, he 
struck. It was astonishing to see the little man smack- 
ing and kicking burly brutes twice his size; though he 
knew well that they would never dare to hit back. 

When the carriage was quite empty he took us inside 
and placed us in a corner. The Turkish rabble, swear- 
ing and grumbling, returned with their packs and their 
rifles, and scowled at us as they packed themselves into 
the remaining seats. The whole matter could have 
been arranged, with a twentieth of the fuss, by merely 
moving nine Turks from one end of the carriage to the 
other. 

"Good?" asked the commandant, proudly, after we 
were seated. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 123 

" Magnificent !" I replied, while we tried hard not 
to let our self-control be blown over by gusts of laugh- 
ter. 

"Then, au revoir, my friend." 

"Adieu, mister the commandant." 

He strutted down the platform; and we passed from 
Alukeeshla to whatever weird experiences might be 
waiting for us elsewhere. 



This chapter is but an amplification of an inscription 
signed by H. and myself before we left our mud home. 
When passing toward Alukeeshla from the station, 
take the second turning to the right beyond the gen- 
darmerie, then the first to the left, and enter the fifth 
house in a row of buildings that stare at you from the 
bottom of a blind alley. Climb some rickety stairs to 
the back room on the first floor, and you may still 
find these words on one of the walls: 

"In memory of some bad days and good yarns, spent 
and told in this dirty room of this verminous hut in this 
God-forsaken village. - To Hell with the Turks!" 



CHAPTER VII 

IN THE SHADOW OF THE BLACK ROCK 

Moored under a willow tree, we were clearing what 
was left of the cold chicken and salad from the middle 
of a punt. I filled the Chambertin bottle with water 
and dropped it overboard. It plashed and sank noise- 
lessly to the bottom of the Thames. From the far 
side of our island came the metallic strains of a gramo- 
phone, made less blatant by the soft atmosphere of the 
river. A passing punt-pole clacked, rose from the sur- 
face, stabbed the water and clacked again. Flies 
danced from the hot sunlight into the shade of the wil- 
low, and hovered over the remains of our lunch. I 
composed the cushions and lay down, opposite Phyllis. 

But the cushions became harder and harder, and the 
breeze merged gradually into a stuffy, dark oppressive- 
ness. I opened my eyes, and sat up. The head cush- 
ion, it appeared, was a sackful of kit, my white flannels 
were a uniform in creased and dirtied khaki, Phyllis 
was Alfonso the Turkish guard, and the Thames the 
military baths at Afion-kara-Hissar, in the centre of 
Anatolia. 

Some ragged Turks arrived through the stone passage 
that led to the hot room, and began undressing. Cuth- 
bert was talking to the bath attendant, while Alfonso 
lay opposite me and snored. H. and W. also snored 

124 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 125 

in dissonant notes. R. was sorting out his kit. The 
rest of the party still slumbered silently, stretched out 
in twisted attitudes on the stone floor. 

Then I remembered how we were dragged from 
the train in the early hours of the morning, and had 
wandered through the streets of Afion-kara-Hissar, 
looking for the prison camp. Finding it closed to night 
arrivals, Cuthbert and Alfonso led us to the Madrissah 
hammam, in the courtyard of a mosque. Weary with 
want of sleep and the hardships of a long journey, we 
had slept for several hours on the floor of the outer bath- 
room. 

Only R. had risked taking ofFhis boots; and these had 
evidently disappeared, for as he searched his loud curses 
echoed from the domed roof. As was to be expected, 
all the Turks in the room disclaimed volubly any knowl- 
edge of the missing boots, so that when we moved to 
the prisoners' camp R. clattered along the streets in a 
pair of wooden sandals borrowed from the bath at- 
tendant. 

A Turkish officer met us at the barrier which divided 
the street of prison-houses from the rest of the town, 
and sent us to meet the British adjutant of the camp. 
Cuthbert and Alfonso waved a good-humoured fare- 
well and disappeared. With them they took our cook- 
ing pots — although we did not discover this fact until 
later in the day. By that time they had left Afion- 
kara-Hissar. We swore long and loud at the memory 
of the two guards, for in those days any sort of a cook- 
ing utensil was in Turkey worth at least two pounds. 

Passing up the narrow street we were greeted by 
groups of weirdly clothed Britishers. Some wore torn 



126 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

and creased uniforms and a civilian cap or a much- 
dented billycock; some a military hat and ill-fitting 
suits of shoddy mufti; some were in khaki shorts sur- 
mounted by shirts of violent colours open at the neck; 
some wore heavy boots, some wore bedroom slippers, 
some wore sandals. 

Many of them were survivors of the Kut-el-Amara 
garrison and had been prisoners in Turkey for two and 
a half years. Their uniforms had long since become 
scarecrow relics of better days, since when they had 
depended for clothing on the supplies forwarded by the 
Dutch Legation at Constantinople. The productions 
of the Turkish tailors and shirt-makers, as issued to the 
prisoners at Afion, were entertaining but rather anarchic. 

Afion-kara-Hissar contained the largest prison- 
camp in Turkey, although there were others at Yozgad, 
Broussa and Geddos — the last-named being for the 
fifty or sixty of his Majesty's officers who had been 
persuaded to give parole not to attempt an escape. 
When the first batch of British officers arrived at Afion 
the Turks turned some Armenian families out of their 
homes, confiscated the furniture, and told the captives 
from the Dardanelles and Mesopotamia that they were 
to live in the empty houses. 

"Beds? Furniture?" said the commandant. "We 
have none, and it is impossible to supply any." 

"Food?" he said in reply to another demand. "It is 
well known that all British officers are rich. You have 
money enough to buy food for yourselves." 

And so it had to be. At first the British officers 
lived on their pay as captives; which, according to rank, 
was at the rate of seven to ten Turkish pounds a month. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 127 

But food prices soon expanded to extraordinary pro- 
portions, while the exchange value of the Turkish 
pound continued to decrease. By the beginning of 
1918 it was worth less than two and a half dollars; while 
sugar, for example, was four dollars a pound. Tea was 
fifty dollars a pound, and real coffee was unobtainable. 
Under these conditions, it became almost impossible to 
obtain even a bare subsistence on seven Turkish pounds 
a month without outside help. The Dutch Legation, 
therefore, supplemented each captive officer's pay to 
the extent of five, then fifteen, Turkish pounds a month, 
taken from the Red Cross funds at their disposal. 

Even thus the food difficulties could not have been 
solved without the help of parcels from home. These 
arrived either seven or eight months after they left 
England, or never. Many were delivered only after the 
Turks had looted from them such articles as were scarce, 
including boots, clothes, and good tobacco. Letters 
from England needed from two to five months for transit. 

The lack of furniture was overcome by amateur 
carpentry. With string, nails, and planks of wood each 
newly arrived prisoner constructed a bed, a table, and 
a chair. Profiteers in the bazaar naturally took advan- 
tage of the demand for wood, and, by the time of which 
I write, the price of it had soared to two Turkish pounds 
a plank. 

Besides the officers there were at Afion about two 
hundred Tommies shut up in a Greek church. Their 
daily rations from the Turks were one small loaf of 
bad bread and one basin of thin soup. For the rest, 
they existed on the tinned food which they received 
from time to time in parcels. 



128 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

As for the Russian soldiers, who were herded into 
the Madrissah buildings, they were literally starving, 
and most of them had sold part of their clothing to buy 
extra food. Weak and ragged, they passed the time 
in walking round and round the courtyard. During 
the bitter months of winter scores of them died from 
hunger and cold. 

Conditions in the prison camp varied according to 
the character of whoever happened to be the Turkish 
commandant. For a time the officer in charge was one 
Muslum Bey, who was reported to have committed 
several executions for Enver Pasha during the turbulent 
days of the Young Turk coup d'etat in 1908. He was 
a brute, a swindler, and a degenerate, and during his 
reign unspeakable outrages were committed. He him- 
self gave a Russian officer who had committed some 
minor offence more than a hundred strokes of the bas- 
tinado. When his arm was tired he made his sergeant- 
major continue the flogging until the Russian fainted. 
The unconscious body of the victim was then thrown 
into a cellar, where a part of his face was burned by 
contact with quick-lime. 

Muslum Bey not only stole food parcels from Eng- 
land but made a practice of deducting part of the 
monthly pay which helped to procure for the British 
Tommies a bare existence. In addition, he made an 
arrangement with bazaar traders whereby a monopoly 
in certain articles of food came into being, so that the 
prisoners had to pay incredible prices, or go hungry. 

It was not until the visit of a Swiss Commission that 
was investigating the prison-camps of Turkey that the 
British officers at Afion-kara-Hissar heard of Muslum 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 129 

Bey's worst outrage. The brutal commandant had 
taken great care that there should be no communica- 
tion between the captive officers and the captive men, 
and severe punishment was inflicted if a Tommy tried 
to speak with a British officer whom he chanced to pass 
in the street. Scenting that something was wrong the 
officers induced members of the Swiss Commission to 
take with them the senior British doctor when they 
visited the Tommies in the Greek Church. Almost 
the first words that Colonel B., the doctor in question, 
heard on entering the building were the equivalent of 
"I've been outraged, sir." He then learned the story 
of how two British soldiers, thrown into jail for some 
trivial offence, had been forcibly outraged, first by the 
commandant and then by his sergeant-major. 

The Swiss Commission itself was not immune from 
Muslum Bey's criminality. An Australian officer took 
a member of it aside, and told him the full story of the 
awful death-march from Kut-el-Amara, on which the cap- 
tured garrison, already reduced by hunger, were forced 
to trek over 800 miles of desert and mountain, being left 
to die in the scorching sun if they fell out owing to weak- 
ness — a death-march which is responsible for the fact 
that less than 25 per cent, of the men captured at Kut- 
el-Amara are alive to-day. 

"Yes, we know all about it," said the Swiss, "and 
we had it in our notes. But most of our papers were 
stolen the other day." 

When I reached Anon, in May, 191 8, the conditions 
had improved. As a result of a secret report by the 
senior British officer, smuggled to the headquarters at 
Constantinople of the Ottoman Red Crescent, Muslum 



i 3 o EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Bey had been removed from his position and impris- 
oned. He was put on trial for his many crimes; but 
owing to baksheesh and to political protection the sen- 
tence was but a few months' imprisonment. He had 
already served this period while awaiting trial, and was 
therefore released immediately after sentence. He went 
into business as a shopkeeper, and sold among other 
things tinned food bearing British labels — tinned food 
of the kind that anxious people in England and India 
lovingly bought and lovingly packed for their husbands, 
sons, and relatives who were prisoners of war. 

Meanwhile, although Muslum Bey had been given 
only the travesty of a punishment by the Turkish 
j udges, instructions were sent from the Turkish War Office 
that life at the prison-camps of Afion-kara-Hissar was 
to be made more pleasant. We were, for example, 
allowed the run of a portion of the hillside. In cold 
print such a concession seems unimportant enough, 
but to men who had become staled and unspeakably 
bored by months of captivity during which their only 
exercise was to walk up and down a narrow street, it 
was a godsend. Cricket and football matches were also 
allowed, and two or three times a week long walks were 
arranged. 

Members of these walking parties would study the 
flat plain that surrounded Afion-kara-Hissar and the 
succession of hill-ranges beyond it, and would dream of 
an escape to some point on the coast. 

From this town in the centre of Anatolia, however, 
escape seemed an impossibility, for the nearest point 
of the coast was 150 miles distant, and the intervening 
country, wild and almost trackless, was full of brigands 



fc EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 131 

and starving outlaws of every description, who would 
cheerfully kill a chance traveller for a pair of boots, a 
loaf of bread, or merely for practice. In any case, a 
tramp to the coast must extend over at least five weeks, 
and it was difficult to see how food for this long period 
could be carried. 

Several officers were carrying on a secret correspond- 
ence with friends in England by means of code, and 
were trying to prepare wild schemes whereby a boat 
was to be waiting for them at some specified part of the 
coastline between specified dates, or whereby an aero- 
plane was to pick them up during the night. Most of us 
gave up the idea of making a dash for freedom from 
Afion, and schemed to be sent to Constantinople, where 
the chances of success would be greater. 

When a recently captured prisoner first accepted 
the fact that escape from Afion-kara-Hissar was im- 
possible, and when the monotony of captivity had per- 
meated him, he would as a rule pass through a period 
of melancholia and the deepest depression. A black 
rock — huge, gaunt, and forbidding — overshadowed the 
little town from its height of 2,000 feet of almost sheer 
precipice. For hours at a time one would stare at its 
bare blackness, and at the crumbling ruins of the for- 
tress, built by the Seljak Turks, which topped the rock; 
and the blackness and bareness would enter into one's 
soul and plunge one into a swirling vortex of morbid 
thoughts. For me the rock was a symbol of captivity — 
bleak, inexorable, and unrelenting. 

Yet, as a rule, the period of melancholia soon passed, 
and gave place to resigned acceptance of the trivial 
and monotonous daily round of prison life. This more 



i 3 2 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

or less sane view of things was only made possible by- 
improvised distractions, by reading, and by the dis- 
cussion of the thousand-and-one rumours that spread 
from the bazaars. Time and again it would be whis- 
pered by some Greek trader that Talaat Pasha was 
negotiating a separate peace and had agreed to open 
the Dardanelles, or that war was about to be declared 
between Turkey and Bulgaria as a result of the Dob- 
rudja dispute, or that Enver Pasha had been assassi- 
nated, or that the Sultan was determined to rid himself 
of the Young Turk government. We knew well that 
these reports were untrue and scarce worth even the 
attention of bitter laughter; but since we wanted them 
to be true they would be discussed with gravity over 
the mess-tables until the next batch of newspapers 
proved their falsity. 

The most useful means to forgetfulness was the camp 
library. Many hundreds of books were sent to the 
prison-camps of Turkey by various societies and individ- 
ual sympathizers in England. It was at Afion-kara- 
Hissar that I first found the courage and concentration 
necessary to read through each and every consecutive 
volume of Gibbon. "The Decline and Fall of the 
Roman Empire," by the way, was probably more in 
demand than anything else in the library; for the state 
of mind induced by captivity needed something more 
solid and satisfying than the best yeller-seller. Great 
favourites, too, were books of Eastern travel and ad- 
venture — in particular the works of Burton and La- 
martine, the "Travels of Marco Polo the Venetian/' and 
MorierV'HajjiBaba." A copy of Plutarch's "Lives"also 
received the attention of much wear and tear. For the 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 133 

rest, many a time have I thanked the gods for Kipling; 
but never more heartily than when lying on the hillside 
at Afion and forgetting the Black Rock and all that it 
stood for in the company of Kim the lovable, Lalun the 
lovely, and The Man Who Would Be King. 

Away from the ragtime blare and rush of modern 
life this isolation in a small town of a semi-civilized 
province gave the prisoners time and opportunity to 
"find" themselves, so that for the first time in their 
lives many began to think individually, instead of ac- 
cepting conventional opinions at second hand. At 
least one book of promise was written at Afion-kara- 
Hissar, and four others have found publication. Several 
excellent poems were born there amid a welter of verse 
that was deathless because lifeless. Plays, paintings, 
and songs were produced in profusion. One man, an 
Australian, made a very thorough study of the ancient 
civilizations of the Middle East, and could supply ac- 
curate information, without reference to a book, about 
every phase of the rise and fall of Babylon and Nineveh, 
of the Medes and Persians, of the Chaldeans and As- 
syrians, with the extent and location and customs of 
the various empires. Yet he confessed that three years 
earlier, at a time when he was flying in Mesopotamia, 
he had no more interest in Babylon than in Nashville, 
Tennessee. 

Apart, however, from the quality of this work pour 
passer le temps, the very fact that so many should ad- 
venture into the unknown country of creative effort 
proved that, when away from the preoccupations of an 
artificial social system, even the average Englishman 
turned instinctively to learning and the arts. 



134 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Meanwhile, many a lively performance was given 
in the garden which served as open-air theatre, with 
plays written and songs composed by people who, be- 
fore being subjected to the isolation of captivity, had 
occupied themselves solely with soldiering or business. 
Comic relief also was provided by two youthful subal- 
terns who set up shop as earnest-minded philosophers, 
and on a foundation of Nietzsche, Wilde, and Shaw built 
a gargoyled edifice that was perverted and extrava- 
gantly young, but withal vastly entertaining. 

The social life of the camp was complex. Despite 
the absence of the female of the species, it resembled 
in many ways that of a suburb in some wealthy city of 
the Midlands. As was to be expected among a hun- 
dred people confined in two small streets, innumerable 
cliques were formed, from each of which ripples of 
gossip spread outward until they merged into and were 
overwhelmed by another eddy of gossip. Starting in 
the morning from a small room in a wooden house an 
item of scandal would, by the evening, have reached every 
room of thirty other houses — how X. had received 
a pair of pyjamas for nothing from the Red Cross supply 
and sold them for three liras; how Y. had climbed 
over several roofs at night-time and, in the shadow of 
a chimney, met that Armenian girl with the large 
eyes; how Z. had begun to smoke opium. Opium, by 
the way, could be had in plenty. The production of it 
was the chief industry of Afion-kara-Hissar ("afion" 
is Turkish for "poppy," "kara hissar" being "black 
rock"). Enormous poppy-fields spread all round the 
town in vivid splashes of red and white. 

Yet with all the trivial gossip and light scandal there 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 135 

was a very real sense of comradeship. If any man were 
sick the remainder would fall over each other in their 
desire to be of help. If any house were short of wood 
during the bitter months of winter its inmates could al- 
ways borrow from such as had enough and to spare. A 
new prisoner, possessing no money and a minimum of 
clothes — as was the case with most of us — would find 
himself overwhelmed by loans and gifts. 

When I was at Afion the camp was very much pre- 
occupied with rumours of a forthcoming exchange of 
sick prisoners between Great Britain and Turkey. 
Scores of intrigues centred round the room of Major 
H., then senior medical officer among the British; for 
it would be his task to examine the "unfit" before de- 
ciding which were to be sent for further and final ex- 
aminations by Turkish medical boards. Scarcely a 
man failed to produce an ailment. Wounds that had 
healed years before were bandaged and treated with 
unnecessary care. Limps of every description were to 
be seen in the street. Some claimed to be deaf. Others 
allowed their gray hairs to grow long, and continued 
to express an opinion that the old and feeble should be 
sent home first. Such as could produce neither old 
age nor some physical ailment discussed loss of memory 
and mental trouble. 

All day long Major H. examined the claimants, 
smiled to himself, and compiled lists. These, I imagine, 
must have been subdivided something like this — (a) 
those who suffered from real injuries or illnesses; (b) 
those who were middle-aged, and had minor ailments; 

(c) those who were young, and had minor ailments; 

(d) those who might conceivably have minor ailments 



i 3 6 EASTERN NIGHTS-AND FLIGHTS 

but could supply no visible symptoms; (e) those who 
had nothing the matter with them, but were good liars, 
and as such might convince the Turks; (f) those who 
were not only healthy, but bad liars. 

Besides the British there were at Afion about a hun- 
dred Russian officers; for although the peace of Brest- 
Litovsk had been signed and Russia was at peace with 
Germany, the Russian was the traditional enemy of the 
Turk, and none knew when war might break out be- 
tween Turkey and the small states which had sprung 
up in the Caucasus. With no money, no Red Cross 
supplies, no means of communicating with their rela- 
tives, and no knowledge of whether these relatives had 
survived the Bolshevist terror, the Russian officers 
among us lived miserably, and were largely dependent 
upon the charity of British fellow-captives. In return 
they taught some of us a smattering of Russian, and 
helped to pass the time with their interminable but 
entertaining talk. They also provided a really fine choir, 
with Captain Korniloff, a cousin of the famous general, 
as one of its leading members. Besides ourselves, its 
audience, when the choir sang on the hillside, never 
failed to include the dark-haired Armenian girls — the 
only Armenians left in the town — who had been saved 
from the exodus and massacres of 191 5-16 that they 
might serve the pleasures of Turkish officers and offi- 
cials. They listened from a distance, and looked their 
sympathy, as we looked ours. 

At the beginning of each month, when the funds 
arrived from Constantinople, there would be a suc- 
cession of birthday parties. On these occasions the 
rule was relaxed whereby each prisoner must remain in 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 137 

his own house after seven o'clock. The Turks rever- 
ence birthdays, and by playing upon this fact permis- 
sion would be obtained to celebrate in a friend's 
room. It was necessary to claim birthdays in rotation, 
for even the Turks might have disbelieved if the 
same prisoner had three of them in three successive 
months. 

I shall always remember a party given on the evening 
of my arrival by White, an Australian aviator captured 
in the early days of the Mesopotamian campaign. It 
was my first introduction to arak, a kind of a tenth- 
rate absinthe, which, excepting some incredibly bad 
brandy, was then the only alcoholic stimulant to be 
bought in Anatolia. Finding it far stronger than it 
seemed, I had almost forgotten captivity and its mis- 
eries in an unreal enjoyment of the songs, the stories, 
and the general hilarity — hilarity which was merely a 
cloak for forgetfulness. And then, amid the fumes 
and the shouting, there recurred insistently the thought 
of escape. I spoke of it to the man nearest me, a short 
figure in a faded military overcoat, Turkish slippers, 
and an eyeglass. 

"Not so loud," he warned. "You can't trust half 
these Russians. Come over into the corner." 

Yeats-Brown, the speaker, began to suggest advice 
about how best to escape. One's only chance, he de- 
clared, was to get to Constantinople. He himself 
claimed nose trouble, and having cultivated the friend- 
ship of the local Turkish doctor, he was to be sent for 
treatment to a hospital in the capital. If I could in- 
vent some plausible ailment he would persuade the 
Turkish doctor to use his influence on my behalf. Mean- 



138 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

while, we would have further talks and discuss plans. 
The great thing was to get to Constantinople. 

Although I did not know it at the time there were 
in that bare room several men with whom, in a few 
weeks' time, I was to be involved in a succession of 
extraordinary intrigues and adventures, when we should 
have met again in Constantinople. There was the host 
himself — Captain White — who later on joined me in 
a thousand-mile journey, through Russia and Bulgaria, 
to freedom; there was Captain Yeats-Brown, who for 
weeks went about an enemy capital disguised as a girl; 
there was Paul, who was to escape three times, be 
recaptured twice, and finally to marry the English lady 
who helped him; there was Prince Constantine AvalofF, 
a Russian colonel, who was to help us all by acting as 
go-between; there was Lieutenant Vladimir Wilkowsky, 
a Polish aviator, whom I was to see again on the other 
side of the Black Sea, in German-occupied Odessa. 
Meanwhile, the arak bottle passed round, and the songs 
grew louder and wilder, until daylight broke up the 
party and we returned to our rough, hand-made beds. 

It now became my aim in life to reach Constanti- 
nople. My injuries had healed, and at a moment's 
notice I could produce no convincing illness. I de- 
cided, therefore, on some form of mental trouble. Yeats- 
Brown had already mentioned me to his friend the 
Turkish doctor; and I was to have been examined, when 
yet again the unexpected happened. It was ordered 
by the Ministry of War that the seven of us who left 
Damascus together were to be forwarded to Constanti- 
nople, presumably for interrogation. 

I took with me high hopes and the addresses of vari- 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 139 

ous civilians in the capital who might be of help. As 
we entrained, and moved westward through the poppy- 
fields, the Black Rock — which more than ever seemed 
a symbol of the blackness and menace which over- 
shadowed prisoners in this half-barbaric country — 
loomed gigantic and forbidding, so that we were thank- 
ful when the railway wound round a hill and shut it 
from sight. I vowed to myself that never again would 
I return to the monotonous death-in-life of the prison 
camp at its foot, on the fringe of the squalid town of 
Afion-kara-Hissar. 



CHAPTER VIII 

CONSTANTINOPLE; AND HOW TO BECOME MAD 

Your best card," said Pappas Effendi, "is vertige. 
Melancholia and loss of memory and nervous break- 
down and all that'll be helpful, but play up vertige for 
all you're worth. It can mean anything. Besides, 
it's impressive." 

Pappas Effendi was a Roman Catholic chaplain, 
waiting at Psamatia (a suburb of Constantinople) to be 
exchanged as a sick prisoner of war. He and I were 
discussing how best I could be admitted to hospital, 
so as to remain in the capital. As my injuries had healed, 
and I could conjure up no physical disorder, I decided 
to claim, therefore, that as a result of the aeroplane 
crash in Palestine I suffered from nervous and mental 
troubles. 

For the few British officers at Psamatia the accom- 
modation was fair to very fair; but for the soldiers of 
many nationalities in the same camp, life must have 
been dreadful. Hundreds of them — Britishers, In- 
dians, Russians, Roumanians, and Serbs — were herded 
together into filthy, crowded outhouses and sheds. 
They were allowed outside them only twice a day, when 
they walked backward and forward, forward and 
backward across the yard, by way of exercise. Most 
of them had done nothing else for months. Their 

140 



EASTERN NIGHTS AND— FLIGHTS 141 

daily rations were the usual loaf of bread and basin of 
unnourishing soup. 

For the Britishers and Indians conditions were not so 
bad; because they received occasional food parcels from 
home, and a small monthly remittance from the Red 
Cross. The Russians, Roumanians, and Serbs had 
neither money nor parcels. Some died of weakness, 
some sold half their clothing to buy food, and in conse- 
quence died of cold during the bitter winters. The 
Tommies were also better off in that they were supplied 
with clothes and boots by the Dutch Legation, which 
administered the Red Cross funds. Prisoners of other 
nationalities walked about gaunt and in tatters. The 
British gave them whatever food and tobacco could be 
spared on parcel-days, but even so they could often be 
seen scrambling for a thrown-away stump of cigarette, or 
for bits of bread or biscuit. Many seemed almost bestial 
in their hopeless misery. Only the Serbs, stoic as always 
maintained a reserved dignity and scorned to beg. 

Two or three times a week we were allowed into 
Stamboul, in parties of two or three, each with a guard. 
On such days the usual rendezvous for lunch was a little 
restaurant near the bridge across the Golden Horn. 
To pass over the bridge across the Golden Horn was 
forbidden; for Pera, the European quarter, was pro- 
Ally almost to a man, and a British prisoner might find 
many helpers there. Even in the preeminently Turk- 
ish Stamboul one often happened upon sympathizers. 
There was, for example, a young Armenian who, when- 
ever he could, talked politics to us on the little subur- 
ban railway between Stamboul and Psamatia, and told 
us the latest false report of an imminent peace. 



i 4 2 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

"Nous sommes tous des Anglophiles ackarnes," he 
assured F. and me. 

The threatened interrogation never happened; and one 
evening it was announced that our party of seven was 
to return to Afion-kara-Hissar. From every point 
of view it would be advisable to remain in Constanti- 
nople. I believed it to be the only Turkish town in 
which one might arrange a successful escape, and I 
knew that it contained civilians who were either British 
themselves or willing to help British prisoners. More- 
over, it offered infinite possibilities in the way of distrac- 
tion, which were always attainable through baksheesh, 
that lowest common denominator of the Turkish Em- 
pire. And if the long-promised exchange of sick pris- 
oners took place Constantinople was obviously the 
place where strings must be pulled if one wanted to be 
sent home on the strength of some feigned weakness. 

There were at Psamatia two officers who had been 
told that they would be among the first batch of pris- 
oners to leave the country. One of them, Flight- 
Lieutenant F., claimed to be suffering from some form 
of tuberculosis difficult of definition and detection but 
strongly supported by influential friends. The other 
was Father M., a Roman Catholic padre who was 
among the captured garrison of Kut-el-Amara. It was 
evident that thirty months of captivity had seriously 
affected his well-being, mental and physical. In any 
case, as a non-combatant well over military age, the 
white-haired priest should most certainly have been 
allowed to leave Turkey. Meanwhile, he was well loved 
by all at Psamatia, even by the guards, who knew him 
as "Pappas Effendi." Whenever he passed down the 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 143 

street children from among the Catholic Christians 
who lived near the prison-house would stand in his way, 
and demand a blessing. 

Unfortunately there was in the camp library no 
medical text-book to tell how a prisoner might feign 
nervous disorders. I had to be content with coaching 
from Pappas Effendi, and with practising before the 
mirror a doleful look, tempered by a variety of twitch- 
ings. Then I visited the camp doctor. Ever since my 
aeroplane smash, I complained with mournful insis- 
tence, I had suffered terribly from vertige, from periods 
of utter forgetfulness, from maddening melancholia, 
and from nervous outbreaks. Above all from vertige. 

Fortunately the doctor, like most Turkish medical 
men, was both ignorant and lazy. His day's work was 
to sit in an office for two hours, always smoking a ciga- 
rette through an absurdly long holder, and having lis- 
tened to the translated statements of would-be pa- 
tients, either to send them away with a pill or to 
write out a form whereby they could be examined at a 
hospital. 

A wound or an injury he might have treated by pill; 
but it was plain that the very suggestion of mental 
trouble stumped him. He could not withstand the 
word vertige, and after a second repetition of it I had 
no difficulty in procuring a chit ordering me to be dealt 
with by a hospital doctor. 

That same afternoon I was led to Gumuch Souyou 
Hospital, in Pera. There my claims to admission as a 
mentally afflicted person were granted without ques- 
tion, so that I began to wonder whether or not I really 
was in my right mind. Having heard the list of pre- 



i 4 4 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

tended symptoms, not forgetting the vertige, an Ar- 
menian doctor sent me to bed for a fortnight's rest. 

W., whose wounded arm was badly inflamed, already 
occupied a bed in the same room, as did Ms., who years 
before had ricked his right knee and, by reason of its 
weakness, managed to stay in hospital, with one eye 
on the possibilities of an exchange of prisoners. R., who 
had the same object in view, turned up from Psamatia 
later in the day. He had shown two perfectly healed 
bullet-wounds in the leg, received three years earlier in 
Gallipoli, and bluffed the Turkish doctor into believing 
that they were giving him renewed trouble. 

Now clearly, if I wished to maintain a reputation for 
melancholia, nervous fits, and vertige, I should have to 
prove abnormality; and just as clearly it would be diffi- 
cult to give convincing performances before fellow- 
prisoners who knew me to be normal. The only solu- 
tion was to demand removal to a single-bedded room, 
for the sake of quiet. 

" Pulse and heat normal," commented the ward doc- 
tor next morning. Pulses, hearts, and doctors are often 
unaccommodating. 

" Yes, Monsieur le docteur. For the moment nothing 
worries me, except that I have forgotten all that has hap- 
pened since the aeroplane smash. Sometimes my mind 
is a black blank, sometimes I am unconscious of what 
I do, sometimes the vertige is so bad that I cannot stand 
on my feet. Above all, I hate being near anybody. I 
desire complete rest. Will you be so kind as to let me 
go to a small room where I can remain alone?" 

The doctor was only half convinced; but he gave in- 
structions for the change, while W. turned over sud- 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 145 

denly to hide his face, and covered his head with a 
blanket so as not to laugh out loud. 

Once again, as I lay in bed and racked my common- 
sense for ideas on the subject of nervous fits and vertige, 
I deplored the lack of any kind of medical text-book; 
for never before had I suffered from mental derange- 
ment. 

"Pulse and heart normal," the doctor said inexor- 
ably on the following morning. 

Then, some hours later, the conduct of Ibrahim, the 
fat orderly, suggested the required inspiration. Dis- 
regarding instructions not to worry me, he entered the 
room in the heat of early afternoon, sat down, leaned 
his head on the table, and began to snore. That really 
did upset my nerves, and consciously I stimulated the 
sense of irritation until I was furious with the Turkish 
orderly. Finally, blending this anger with the need of 
producing some sort of a fit, I considered how best to 
attack him, and what attitude to adopt afterward. 

I jumped out of bed, opened the door, seized Ibrahim 
round the middle, and flung him into the corridor, while 
he yelled with surprise. Next I sat down on the bed, 
and began tearing the sheets into long strips. The cor- 
poral of the guard, with another Turkish soldier, half 
opened the door, cautiously, and looked inside. I stared 
at them blankly, then got into bed and lay down quietly, 
facing the wall. 

Ibrahim returned presently with the doctor of the 
day, who entered with a surprised and quizzical "Qu 9 
est-ce quit y 9 a?" 

"Doctor," I said, "I fail to remember what I've been 
doing during the last five minutes. But I feel I've been 



146 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

through a crisis. Even now my head swims. I suffer 
from acute vertige." 

Followed a long explanation in Turkish, with ges- 
tures, from Ibrahim. The doctor felt my pulse, which 
fortunately had accelerated during the calculated ex- 
citement of heaving the orderly out of the room. 

" Calmez-vous, donc y " said the doctor. "Tout sera 
Men apres quelques semaines" I liked the suggestion of 
"some weeks," for anything might happen in that time. 

Before leaving me the doctor prescribed some sort of 
a bromide mixture, with calming qualities. The first 
performance, I felt, had been rather a success. As for 
the bromide mixture, I poured it out of the window 
during the night. The bottle was filled again in the 
morning. 

Next day was a fitless one; and by the evening I felt 
that something must be done to maintain my reputa- 
tion. Still knowing little of how a man with my com- 
plaints must act, I thought — wrongly, as I discovered 
later — that somnambulism would fit in with the general 
scheme of abnormality. 

I stayed awake until two a.m.; and then, wearing a 
nightshirt, walked woodenly into the passage, with 
arms outstretched and head upheld. The guard was 
dozing on a bench that faced the door, and when I 
passed he took not the least notice. Feeling hurt at 
such disregard, I turned and passed him again, this 
time taking care to nudge his knee. He rubbed his 
eyes, shrilled an exclamation, and began running in the 
opposite direction. When he returned with the ser- 
geant of the guard, a quarter of an hour later, I was in 
bed and apparently asleep. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 147 

During the week that followed I gave several minor 
performances. Soon, however, I was ousted from my 
single-bedded blessedness by a more worthy madman. 
A Turkish soldier passed into a violent delirium, and 
ran down the corridor on all fours, calling out that he 
was a horse. This was far more striking than anything 
I had imagined or attempted. The delirious Turk was 
therefore confined apart in my little room while I 
shared a ward with four Turkish officers. 

I chose melancholia for the first demonstration in the 
new quarters. All day I stared at the ceiling, and an- 
swered questions with a rough "oui" or "non," without 
looking at the questioner. Then, at three a.m., when the 
four Turks were asleep, I picked up a medicine bottle, 
half filled with the bromide medicine, and flung it at the 
wall. It struck, tinkled, and scattered in fragments; 
while three of the Turkish officers woke and sat up in 
bed. 

"Air-raid ?" suggested one of them — for at that time 
British bombers from Mudros were visiting Constan- 
tinople on most moonlit nights. 

"No, a bottle," said another, switching on a light and 
pointing to the splintered glass. 

He proceeded to protest angrily in Turkish, and I 
caught the words "mad Englishman." He turned off 
the light, and all lay down again. When the night 
orderly arrived he found everything quiet, and dared 
ask no questions for fear of disturbing the Turkish offi- 
cers. 

Next morning, however, the senior officer in the ward 
protested to the chief doctor against being submitted 
to disturbance and possible violence from a mentally 



i 4 8 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

afflicted Englishman. I was then moved into a large 
room where were W., R., Ms., and other officer prison- 
ers. 

To sham violence before fellow-Britishers was almost 
impossible, I found, even though they cooperated in 
casting dust into Turkish eyes. I modified the fits into 
starts and twitchings whenever a sudden noise coin- 
cided with the presence of a doctor. The melancholia 
and loss of memory I retained, for these were easy of 
accomplishment. 

In any case I should have been obliged to become 
normal enough for walks outside the hospital, if my 
hopes were to become realities. Staying in Constanti- 
nople when the rest of the party had returned to Ana- 
tolia was all very well, but it availed nothing unless I 
could get into touch with people who might help me to 
plan an escape. 

Each Sunday morning such British officers as were 
not confined to bed attended service at the Crimean 
Memorial Church, off the Grande Rue de Pera. I 
wished to make use of this fact in my search for helpers. 
Besides the clergyman himself there were still a few 
British civilians free in Constantinople, and most of 
them visited the church on Sunday mornings. Above 
all, there would be the chance of asking advice from 
Miss Whittaker, a very plucky and noble lady who had 
taken great risks upon herself in helping prisoners. Al- 
ready she had managed to visit us at Gumuch Souyou, 
in the company of a Dutch diplomat's wife who came 
with official sanction. 

A fortnight of fairly mild behaviour gained me per- 
mission to attend divine service. With guards keeping 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 149 

a yard or so behind us we walked through the Grande 
Rue de Pera, with its crowd of evident sympathizers, 
and so to the church at the bottom of a winding side 
street. Then, for an hour, I was in England. Even 
to such a constant absentee from church services as 
myself all England was suggested by the pretty little 
building, with its floor smoothly flagged in squares, its 
simply compact altar, its well-ordered pews, its con- 
sciously reverent congregation, its rippling organ, and — 
yes, by the great truths and dogmatic commonplaces 
that were platitudinized from its pulpit. The very 
sermon — dull, undistinguished, and full of the obvious 
levelness that one hears in any of a thousand small 
churches on any Sunday — brought joy unspeakable 
because of its associations. 

The guards, who had been standing at the back of 
the church with hat on head, refused to let us remain 
near the door when the congregation dispersed. It 
was inadvisable to bribe them in public; so with a 
friendly wave from Miss Whittaker, and sympathetic 
looks from unknown British civilians, we left at once. 
We crossed the Golden Horn to Stamboul, and lunched at 
our usual restaurant, where I met Pappas Effendi again. 

Presently, in strolled another old acquaintance — 
Colonel Prince Constantine Avaloff, the Georgian. He 
had just arrived at Psamatia from Afion-kara-Hissar, 
and brought with him the latest news from that camp — 
the arrival of a new commandant who seemed quite 
pleasant, the success of the latest concert, the delivery 
of a batch of parcels, the increase in price of drak, and 
other of the small happenings that filled the deadly life 
of a prisoner of war in Turkey. For me the most in- 



i 5 o EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

teresting item of news was that Captain Tom White 
was to be sent to a Constantinople hospital. Although 
he had said nothing about escaping, I rather thought 
he intended to try it. If he came to Gumuch Souyou 
he would be a useful companion, for I knew him to be 
both ingenious and unafraid. Meanwhile, I revealed 
my own hopes to the prince, who promised to help in 
any way possible. He was likely to be of use, for as a 
result of Georgia's submission to Germany, he was now 
free to move about the city without a guard. I walked 
back to Pera light-heartedly, with an instinctive knowl- 
edge that opportunity was in the offing. 

A tousled scarecrow of a man was sitting up in a 
hitherto empty bed as we reentered the prisoners' ward 
of the hospital. His long, untrimmed hair hung over 
an unwashed neck, his cheeks were sunken, his hands 
were clasped over the bedclothes that covered his shins. 
He never looked at us, but with an expression of the 
most unswerving austerity continued to read a book 
that lay open on his knees. As I passed I saw, from the 
ruling and paragraphing of the pages, that it must be 
a copy of the Bible. i 

I looked round for enlightenment, only to find my- 
self face to face with an even stranger figure. In a bed 
opposite the scarecrow sat a man whose face was un- 
naturally white. The young forehead was divided and 
sub-divided by deep wrinkles; a golden beard tufted 
from the chin; the head was covered by a too-large 
fez made of white linen. He grinned and waved an 
arm toward the Turkish orderly; but when we looked 
at him, he shrank back in apparent affright, then hid 
under the bedclothes. 



Captain T. W. White, Australian Flying Corps, who accompanied 
Captain Alan Bott in the 1,000 mile Odyssey to Freedom, starting from 
Constantinople. The clothes are the disguise worn by Captain White m 
Constantinople. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 151 

"English officers," said the orderly, "come from Hai- 
dar Pasha Hospital. Both mad." 

"I am not English," protested in Turkish the strange 
befezzed head as it shot from under the bedclothes. 
"I am a good Turk. The English are my enemies. I 
wrote to His Excellency Enver Pasha, telling him I 
wished to become a Turkish officer." 

"Mulazim Heel," continued the Turk, pointing to- 
ward the scarecrow. Then, as he swung his hand in 
the direction of the man who had written to Enver 
Pasha, " Mulazim J aw-nes" 

"My name is not Jones," the Fantastic shouted, 
still speaking in Turkish, "I am Ahmed Hamdi Ef- 
fendi." 

Yet he was indeed Jones, just as much as the scare- 
crow opposite him was Hill. We had heard stories of 
their extravagant doings, but this was our first sight 
of the famous lunatics whose reputation had spread 
through every prison-camp in Turkey. The Turks 
believed them to be mad, and although there were 
sceptics, so did many of the British prisoners. When, 
after watching the pair for several hours, we went into 
the garden that evening and discussed them, we agreed 
that they were either real lunatics or brilliant actors. 

It had all begun months earlier at Yozgad. To pass 
the weary time Jones and Hill dabbled in and experi- 
mented with hypnotism and telepathy. By making 
ingenuity and the conjuror's artifice (at which Hill was 
an expert) adjuncts of their seances, they nonplussed 
fellow-prisoners and Turks alike; for it was impossible 
to tell whether trickery or something inexplicable was 
the basis of their astonishing demonstrations. By 



152 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

means of the Spirit of Music (a hidden lamp with the 
wick turned too high), the Buried Treasure Guarded 
by Arms (some coins and an old pistol that were first 
placed in position and then "revealed" by digging), 
the Miraculous Photographs (taken with a secret 
camera designed and constructed by themselves), and 
other devices, they reduced the camp commandant 
and his staff to a state of bewildered fear. When they 
had hoodwinked the commandant into the belief that 
they could exchange mind-messages with local civilians, 
he confined them in a small room, and allowed no com- 
munication with other prisoners. 

From this time onward, moreover, Jones and Hill 
showed apparent dread of their fellow-prisoners. The 
British officers at Y5zgad wanted to destroy them, they 
informed the Turkish commandant, adding a plea for 
protection. Meanwhile, their hair and beards grew 
longer and more untrimmed, their general appearance 
stranger and wilder. Perhaps their most impressive 
exploit at Yozgad was when a guard found them hang- 
ing side by side on ropes that were suspended from a 
beam, the chairs that supported their weight having 
been kicked away just before he entered the room. He 
cut down the dangling bodies, and his tale confirmed 
the commandant in the belief that the spiritualistic 
prisoners were altogether insane. A few days later 
they went under escort to Constantinople, and were 
admitted to Haidar Pasha Hospital. 

From this hospital their reputation spread all over 
Constantinople. Long before they were transferred 
to Gumuch Souyou I had heard how Hill read the Bible 
all day, and uttered never a word except when he 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 153 

prayed aloud; and how Jones, having in two months 
learned to talk Turkish perfectly, proclaimed himself 
a Turk, and would speak no other language. His 
name, he insisted time and again, was Ahmed Hamdi 
Effendi. He disregarded all Britishers in Haidar 
Pasha Hospital unless it were to tell the Turkish doctor 
that Jones was mad, and therefore, as the afflicted of 
Allah, not to be blamed. 

Once he threw himself into the pond in the garden. 
Once, having received the usual Red Cross monthly 
remittance from an official of the Dutch Legation, he 
tore the bank-notes in two, threw the scraps of paper 
across the room, and declared that he wanted no Eng- 
lish money. During an air-raid over Constantinople 
he ran into the open and demanded a gun, so that he 
might shoot down the British aeroplanes. 

At about sundown on his first evening with us Hill 
closed the Bible, stepped out of bed, and knelt down, 
facing the east. Then, without a pause, he recited 
prayers in a loud voice for twenty minutes. Several 
Turks came in to listen, while Jones, tapping his be- 
fezzed head, explained to them that the kneeling figure 
was mad. 

Each morning and each evening Hill knelt on the 
floor and prayed aloud. Sometimes during the night 
he would walk to another bedside, wake up its occupant, 
and exhort him to prayer. For the rest he spoke never 
a word other than "Yes" or "No," or "I don't know," 
in answer to questions. All day he sat in bed, with 
eyes riveted on the Bible by unswerving concentra- 
tion, or clasped his head and appeared lost in medita- 
tion. When the doctor examined him he paid not the 



154 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

slightest attention, but when an effort was made to take 
away the Bible, he clutched it desperately, and was 
evidently ready to use violence. His hair and beard 
grew longer and more tousled, until he was forcibly 
shaved; whereupon, with his hollowed cheeks and 
sunken, glowing eyes, he looked more of a scarecrow 
than ever. 

Jones kept himself quite dapper in his own peculiar 
fashion. His curly golden beard and moustache seemed 
to be his especial pride. At first Ms. attempted con- 
versations with him; but as he always turned away 
and showed fright, we left him alone Yet twice he 
sought out the chief doctor, and complained that the 
British officers wanted to murder him. Being a Turk, 
he continued, why was he kept in a room with English- 
men, who were his enemies and wanted to hurt him ? 

Beyond laughing and remarking how sad it was that 
our comrade should be so mad, the chief doctor took no 
notice. Thereupon Ahmed Hamdi sat down and wrote 
a letter of furious complaint to His Excellency Enver 
Pasha, Minister of War in the Young Turk govern- 
ment, and incidentally the most ruthless desperado in 
that all-desperado body, the Committee of Union and 
Progress. 

I still remember every detail and movement of an 
absurd scene. Ms. lay asleep one hot afternoon, with 
a bare foot protruding through the bars at the bottom 
of the bed. R. crawled across the floor, intending to 
crouch beneath Ms.'s bedstead and tickle the sole of his 
foot with a feather. Jones, whose bed was next to 
that of Ms., shrank back and made a tentative move 
toward the door as R. glided nearer. R. looked up 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 155 

casually from his all-fours position and found the luna- 
tic's face glaring at him with wide-open, rolling eyes. 
The pair stared at each other surprisedly for a few 
seconds, then Ahmed Hamdi Jones yelled, leaped from 
his bed, and ran out of the room. 

If that was acting, we agreed, it was very wonderful 
acting. We inclined to the theory that Hill and Jones 
had in the beginning merely shammed lunacy, as a 
passport for England, but that under the mental stress 
and nervous strain of living their abnormal roles they 
had really become insane. Another suggestion was that 
they lost their reason already at Yozgad, as a result of 
dabbling overmuch in spiritualism. 

It was White who solved the mystery, although at 
the time he revealed it only to me. With a badly 
marked ankle (the result of a too-hot poultice) well in 
evidence, he arrived one day from Afion-kara-Hissar, 
and suggested to the doctors that the said ankle was 
tubercular. He was placed in the bed next to the 
scarecrow's. 

Hill had let it be known that he was undertaking a 
forty-days' penance, during which he would eat nothing 
but bread. All other food offered him by the Turks he 
ignored. After a few days of semi-starvation his cheek- 
bones were more prominent than ever, his cheeks more 
hollowed, and the colour of his face was an unhealthy 
faint yellow. 

In the middle of the night, when everybody else was 
asleep, White woke him and passed over a note. In 
this, as a fellow-Australian, he offered any sort of as- 
sistance that might be acceptable. Then he handed 
Hill some chocolate and biscuits taken from a newly 



156 EASTERN NIGHTS-AND FLIGHTS 

arrived parcel. These the scarecrow accepted, and, 
not daring to whisper in case somebody were listening, 
wrote a sanely worded message thanking White for 
the offer, which he accepted. It contained also a warn- 
ing that, for safety's sake, the other Britishers must 
be led to believe that both he and Jones were mad. 

Thereafter White fed him secretly each night. In 
the daytime he maintained his long fast, to the great 
astonishment of the Turks. White also helped by 
complaining that the madman woke him at night-time, 
and asked him to pray. 

Later, having heard escape talk between White and 
me, Hill wrote down an address where we might hide in 
Constantinople, and let me into the secret that he was 
pretending lunacy, so as to be sent out of the country 
as a madman. 

Now that I knew the scarecrow and Ahmed Hamdi 
Jones to be as sane as myself, I marvelled at their flaw- 
less presentation of different aspects of lunacy, and at 
the determination which allowed them to play their 
strange parts for months. Hill, in particular, had a 
difficult role, and I wondered that his mind never gave 
way under it. To sit up in bed for twelve hours a day, 
reading and rereading a Bible; to talk to- nobody and 
look at nobody, and to show no sign of interest when 
vital subjects were being discussed by fellow-prisoners 
a few yards away; to pray aloud for nearly half an hour 
each morning and evening, in the presence of a dozen 
people; to maintain an expression of rigid melancholy, 
and not to let even the ghost of a smile touch one's 
features for many weeks — this must require almost in- 
human concentration. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 157 

Jones had a far better time, for his specialty was not 
studied tragedy but spontaneous farce. He seemed to 
enjoy enormously the complete fooling of all around 
him, the planning of a new fantasy and the head-over- 
heels performance of it, without being restrained by 
convention or ridicule, or a sense of the normal. 

Cheerful lunacy, in fact, is great fun. Even in my 
own minor assumptions of a state of unreason I had 
found it very stimulating and amusing. A mental 
holiday from logic, custom, the consideration of public 
opinion and other irksome boundaries of artificial 
stability is glorious. Itself untrammelled, the mind 
can watch from a spectator's point of view the patch- 
work restraints and littlenesses of civilization, and take, 
delight in tilting at them. 

Often I envied Jones, with his fez, his golden beard 
and his role of Ahmed Hamdi Effendi, as he talked to a 
group of Turkish officers. They would laugh at him 
openly; but secretly he would laugh much more heartily 
at them. 

Few things in our roomful of nine British officers 
were not farcical. Only one of us — old W., with his 
wounded arm — had any real claim to be in hospital. 
R., with a healed woundscar dating back to the Galli- 
poli campaign, C, with sciatica and late middle-age; 
and Ms., with a weak knee dating back to before the 
war, were trying to build up a case for release as ex- 
changed prisoners of war. Jones and Hill, by means of 
magnificent acting, had made everybody believe in 
their assumed madness, and were also hoping to be sent 
home in consequence. " Wormy " — formerly aide-de- 
camp to General Townsend — wanted to remain a 



158 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

hospital patient because he had friends and amuse- 
ments in Constantinople, and achieved this wish by 
means of mythical hemorrhages. 

For my part, I still gave false evidence of nervous 
disorders, although such efforts were dwarfed by the 
exploits of Jones and Hill. In any case, it was to my 
interest to show only mild symptoms, such as fits of 
trembling during an air-raid, or whenever a gun was 
fired. Had I been more violent,. I should not have been 
allowed into the dty on Sundays, at a time when I had 
made useful acquaintances and was plotting an escape. 

So the strange days passed. Hill and Jones,, spur- 
red by reports of a near-future exchange of prisoners, 
gave constant and enlivening performances. M. and 
R. cultivated effective limps. Wormy amused himself. 
White and I discussed our plans while strolling in the 
garden. Each morning the doctor walked once round 
the ward, said to each patient: " Bonjour, qa va bien?" 
signed the diet sheets, and left us. Of other medical 
attendance there was none, except when W.'s arm was 
operated on, or when Jones complained to the chief 
doctor about our desire to murder him. 

How the madmen were included in the first batch of 
British prisoners to be exchanged from Turkey, how 
they were led on board the Red Cross ship that the 
Turks had allowed to the Gulf of Smyrna, how Ahmed 
Hamdi Jones protested against being handed over to 
his enemies the British, and how he and the Bible- 
reader miraculously recovered their sanity as soon as the 
British vessel had left Turkish waters, all that is a 
story in itself. 



CHAPTER IX 

INTRODUCING THEODORE THE GREEK, JOHN WILLIE 
THE BOSNIAN, AND DAVID LLOYD GEORGE'S SECOND 

COUSIN 

The Maritza is a little restaurant near Stamboul sta- 
tion. Coming toward it from the bridge across the 
Golden Horn one passed along a side street so narrow 
that the bodies of passengers clinging to the rails of the 
swaying and much-loaded tram-cars often collided with 
pedestrians. With a guard at our heels, we would dis- 
appear through a doorway, and find ourselves in a low 
room that reeked of sausages and intrigue. 

Whenever the captive officers at Psamatia came to 
Stamboul they lunched at the Maritza, where they 
could hear the latest rumours from the bazaars. On 
Sundays they were joined there by not-too-sick officers 
from our hospital and that of Haidar Pasha. 

Theodore, the Greek waiter, looked exactly what 
he was — a born conspirator who had strayed from melo- 
drama into real life. In the whole of Turkey there was 
no greater expert in the science of throwing dust into 
the eyes of soldiers and gendarmes. He not only lived 
by plotting, but, next to money, seemed to like it better 
than anything in the world. 

He was also a first-rate gossip. Having seated the 
guards in a corner where they could see but not hear 

159 



160 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

us, the little Greek, with his bent shoulders and blue- 
glassed spectacles, would sidle up to our table, and pro- 
ducing a menu-card, say: 

"Bonjour! What would you like, gentlemen?" 
Then, running his finger down the list as if suggesting 
something to eat, he would continue: "I heard to-day 
that the Grand Vizier had quarrelled once more with 
the Sultan"; or, "Enver Pasha was shot at in Galata 
yesterday, and is wounded in the chest. It is said that 
he will not recover." He never failed to produce at 
least one such rumour as these. Most often he would 
announce that Bulgaria was about to make a separate 
peace, which possibility was reported in Constantinople 
at least a dozen times before it really happened. 

I always found him trustworthy, for his hatred of the 
Turks was stronger even than his greed for money, 
and no sum could have tempted him to become a spy 
in the service of the Turkish police — a position once 
offered to him. In any case, he was always convinced 
that the British would win the war; and, therefore, 
knowing which side his bread was buttered, would 
never have dared to betray the Britishers who em- 
ployed him. 

As an intermediary for correspondence he was reliable 
but expensive, his charge being twenty piastres for each 
letter delivered. 

"Theodore, my friend," one would say, "I want you 
to go to Pera for me." 

"Good. If you have not written the letter I will 
engage the guards while you prepare it." 

He would then stroll across to the guards' table with 
the news that the British officers would be pleased to 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 161 

buy them whatever they wanted to eat; and the pris- 
oner scribbled his note, a slip of paper resting on his 
lap and the body of Theodore screening him from the 
guards in the far corner. Later the letter would be 
handed to Theodore, in the middle of the banknotes 
with which one paid the bill. 

If a reply were brought, Theodore delivered it under 
cover of a menu-card, always with a whispered re- 
minder, "Twenty piastres." During the last six months 
of the war the Greek waiter must have been the mes- 
senger for scores of secret communications. 

It was early in July when we heard of the arrival in 
Haidar Pasha Hospital — across the Sea of Marmora — 
of Captain Yeats-Brown and Captain Sir Robert Paul. 
Yeats-Brown was demanding attention for his nose and 
Paul for his ear. With vivid memories of conversa- 
tions in Afion, I had sympathy for neither the nose 
nor the ear, but a great deal for the schemes of escape 
which I knew them to be planning. I sent Yeats- 
Brown a note, through the agency of Theodore, suggest- 
ing an appointment for lunch on the following Sunday. 

As a matter of fact, I met him before lunch-time. 
With the rest of the congregation we were leaving for 
the little English church off the Grande Rue de Pera, 
when the pair approached the vestry door with guards 
at their heels. Since I last saw them both had grown 
moustaches, and an appearance of dishevelled untidi- 
ness was given to Paul by a short, stubby tuft of beard. 
At the time I was talking to Miss Whittaker, and I took 
the opportunity of introducing the new arrivals. Paul 
drew Miss Whittaker aside, and began talking earn- 
estly, while Yeats-Brown told me that the guards' 



i62 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

orders were to take him direct to Haidar Pasha, and 
that we should have to wait a week longer before meet- 
ing at the Maritza. 

Next Sunday afternoon, on entering the little res- 
taurant, I heard Yeats-Brown asking Theodore to show 
him where a special brand of cigarettes might be bought. 
This he did in a loud voice, speaking Turkish, as if he 
wished the guards to overhear. The pair left the door- 
way, and disappeared into a tobacco shop. Both de- 
parted bare-headed, so that the guards remained in their 
seats and were unsuspicious. Paul was at a table near 
them, taking great care to appear unconcerned. His 
beard had grown longer during the past seven days, and 
he looked stranger and more dishevelled than ever. 

Five minutes later he and I were joined by Yeats- 
Brown, who, as he returned with Theodore, took care 
to flaunt a newly bought box of cigarettes before the 
eyes of his guard. He had been to look at the outside 
of Theodore's own house, so that he might recognize it. 

He and Paul were to be turned out of hospital in two 
days' time. They had had no time to arrange a defi- 
nite scheme, but as they were to be sent to Asia Minor 
very shortly, it would be necessary for them to escape 
almost immediately. I did not seek to join them, for 
White and I were still safe in Gumuch Souyou and had 
hopes of stealing an aeroplane. I therefore wished 
Yeats-Brown the best of luck, and after returning to 
hospital, waited anxiously for news. 

Our first intimation of what had happened came 
when the chief doctor announced that no Britishers 
were to be allowed into the city, because two prisoners 
had escaped. Soon afterward a Russian, who arrived 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 163 

from Psamatia with influenza, brought details. With 
their bank-notes (obtained from Mr. S., a British civil- 
ian living in Pera) sewn up in suspenders and braces, 
with faces and hands stained brown, and each wearing 
a fez, the pair had climbed out of their window at Psa- 
matia in the middle of the night, crept along a ledge, 
tied a rope to the gutter of the roof, and let themselves 
down into a dark doorway. The rope was found in the 
morning, still dangling from the roof. Since then — 
three days ago — nothing had been heard of them. 

Meanwhile the hopes of White and myself revolved 
round John Willie the Bosnian. This man, an Aus- 
trian aviator who was a lieutenant in the Turkish Fly- 
ing Corps, had been shot down in Palestine, and in the 
ward next to ours was receiving treatment for minor 
injuries. He told Ms. that in a few weeks' time he 
would desert from Turkey by aeroplane, and said he 
wanted a letter of recommendation, to be presented 
to the British when he landed at Mudros. Ms. refused 
to write such a compromising letter, and, not trusting 
the Bosnian, disregarded a suggestion that he should 
be taken as passenger in the proposed flight to Mudros. 

Next, Ms. having left the hospital, the Bosnian ap- 
proached me. Finding that I was a fellow-aviator, 
his first overtures dealt, innocuously enough, with war- 
flying in general and his own experiences in particular. 

Then, one evening, he announced, with the air of a 
conspirator, that he was about to tell me an important 
secret. I knew what was coming, but was careful to 
pretend ignorance. John Willie — the name by which 
he became known to us, for we dared not risk suspicion 
by mentioning his real name when we talked among 



i6 4 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

ourselves in the presence of Turks — thereupon produced 
an English grammar, and said I must make pretence 
of teaching him English, so that we might meet each 
day. He would tell the Turkish doctors that I had be- 
come his schoolmaster. 

His first suggestion, as we sat down on a shady bench, 
was that I should write him a letter to take to Mudros. 
Like Ms., I declined, not knowing what was at the 
back of his mind. A Turkish corporal passed the 
bench, whereupon John Willie began mispronouncing 
some English words, taken at random from the page 
of the grammar which lay open on his lap. 

"If," I said, "you can get me an aeroplane to fly 
to Mudros myself I will. The book is on the table, 
das Buck liegt auf dem Tische." This last when the 
Turkish corporal turned back and glanced at us as he 
passed a second time. 

"Ze book eez on tabel," repeated John Willie. Then 
in German, "I was going to suggest the same thing 
myself." 

" John Willie proceeded to reveal the reasons why he 
was so anxious to desert. As a Bosnian, he said, he 
hated the Austrians, and it was because of this that he 
entered the Turkish and not the Austrian army. In 
any case, his mother was of American birth and was now 
in the United States, while his brother, so he learned, 
had enlisted in the American army. 

His own sympathies were pro-British and pro-Ameri- 
can, and it was his earnest desire to join his mother and 
become naturalized as an American citizen. If, how- 
ever, he landed at Mudros in Turkish uniform, he would 
be made a prisoner of war; whereas if, as a guarantee of 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 165 

good faith, he took with him a British prisoner or a 
letter from a British prisoner, all would be well. 

Next he proceeded to give details of his plan, while 
running his finger over the open page of the English 
grammar, as if reading from it. In about a fortnight's 
time he would be discharged from hospital, and through 
the influence of a friendly staff officer he would be 
posted to the aerodrome at San Stefano. This aero- 
drome, situated about twenty miles from Stamboul, 
was the headquarters of the German pilots who made 
a pretence of defending Constantinople from British 
air-raids. 

Having got himself appointed orderly officer for the 
night, and being the only pilot in the neighbourhood 
of the hangars (for the officers' billets were in San Ste- 
fano itself, half a mile from the aerodrome), it would be 
easy for him to take a petrol-loaded machine into the 
air, head westward, fly over the Dardanelles to the open 
sea, and so to Mudros. 

"If," continued John Willie, "you can make your 
way to San Stefano, it will be a simple matter to pick 
you up near the aerodrome, and to take you as passen- 
ger in the back seat." 

"But," I objected, "there would be a friend with me. 
If I fly to Mudros, he also must come." 

The Bosnian showed his eagerness by an evident de- 
termination to override all suggested difficulties. A 
two-seated Rumpler, he pointed out, could take, be- 
sides the pilot, two men in the observer's cockpit, as had 
been proven many times. The only drawback was that 
if three of us travelled in the same machine our com- 
bined weight would add at least three-quarters of an 



166 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

hour to the flight for freedom, and if we were chased 
and attacked an adequate defence would be made dif- 
ficult. He proposed that I might pilot the two-seater 
while he followed and pretended to give chase in an 
Albatross scout. He was more than willing to escort 
two of us to Mudros if only we would sponsor him with 
the British authorities, and pay his passage to America. 

Several times during the days that followed I plotted 
with the Bosnian in the garden, always with the Eng- 
lish grammar as camouflage for earnest talks. Finally, 
after discussing every detail, we evolved a plan which 
seemed workable. When John Willie should have been 
posted to San Stefano, White and I were to claim that 
we were cured. We should then be transferred to 
Psamatia, which was already half-way between Stam- 
boul and San Stefano. He refused to take the risk of 
helping us to escape from Psamatia, but he would meet 
us after we should have reached the neighbourhood of 
the aerodrome. He could arrange to be night orderly 
officer between two given dates, and during this period 
he would seek us at the place of rendezvous, at three 
o'clock each morning. 

His plan, having found us, was to go to the hangars, 
and on the pretence of testing a Rumpler two-seater, 
take it into the air. He would land in a field near us, 
keeping his engine ticking over. White and I must run 
toward him and climb into the rear cockpit. He 
would leave the ground again immediately, and head 
for the Dardanelles. 

Even taking into account the heavy load of three 
men, pursuit seemed unlikely, because all the other 
pilots would be asleep in their billets. In any case, it 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 167 

was improbable that the mechanics from the aerodrome 
would see us climbing into the Rumpler. We aban- 
doned the suggestion that I should fly the two-seater 
while the Bosnian gave chase in an Albatross, as we 
failed to think of a plausible tale for John Willie to tell 
his mechanics, by way of explaining how the Rumpler 
could have been stolen from him by strangers. 

The Bosnian drew detailed maps, giving the position 
of the aerodrome in relation to San Stefano station, 
with the hangars, the officers' mess, and other buildings 
marked on it. The place of rendezvous was to be the 
fringe of a small wood that bordered a field southwest 
of the aerodrome, on the left-hand side of the road to 
Bulgaria. 

John Willie also procured for us a German stafF-map, 
which included the countryside between Psamatia and 
San Stefano. White and I had decided, however, that 
our best plan would be to give the guards the slip during 
the daytime in one of the winding side streets of Stam- 
boul, to buy tickets openly at the railway station, and 
to travel to San Stefano as ordinary passengers. Us- 
ing John Willie's pencilled map, we could then find 
the place of rendezvous and lie low in the wood until 
the following morning. 

Meanwhile, now that Sunday visits to the city were 
forbidden, I employed the Bosnian as messenger for 
letters to Theodore. We had in mind the alternative 
plan of a stowaway voyage from Constantinople across 
the Black Sea, and we intended to carry it out if John 
Willie failed us. We could not altogether trust him, 
for he continued to demand small loans for preliminary 
expenses. He showed himself, besides, to be both care- 



168 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

less and heedless, so that he seemed a far from desirable 
companion for a desperate adventure. We found that 
in conversation with some English Tommies, who were 
patients in another ward, he had boasted of his plan to 
take White and myself to Mudros; and we feared that 
any day, with so many people discussing it, the story 
might be overheard by an English-speaking doctor. 

Possibly that is what happened, for I noticed that 
each time the Bosnian and I met in the garden we were 
watched closely. One of the patients — a bearded, 
shifty-looking Turk with one arm in a sling — made it 
his business to sit on the same bench, and to listen while 
I pretended to give instruction in the proper pronuncia- 
tion of English. Although I warned John Willie to be 
very careful, he failed to realize the danger, and con- 
tinued to make us all the more conspicuous by talking 
in a low voice. 

One afternoon he approached me with the English 
grammar open in his hand, and pointed to a folded note 
which lay on one of its pages. Two Turkish nurses 
were passing. Seeing that they looked at the book, I 
turned the page quickly to hide the note. But the 
nurses had apparently seen everything, for as they en- 
tered the door of the hospital they whispered and turned 
back. A few minutes later the doctor on duty joined 
us in the garden, and told John Willie that in future it 
would be forbidden to talk with British prisoners. 

Yet we managed three further meetings, which took 
place at the wash-house in the evening. Then John 
Willie disappeared suddenly from the hospital, and we 
were left to our own resources. 

We still had his maps of San Stefano; and when the 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 169 

period set for the escape arrived we should know by 
means of a pre-arranged signal if he was still prepared to 
take us to Mudros. This was that on the Sunday 
morning preceding the first date of rendezvous he was 
to fly over Psamatia in a Nieuport scout, and perform 
stunts. 

Meanwhile, White and I now lacked a go-between. 
More than ever it was necessary that one or both of us 
should see Theodore, and try to get into touch with 
somebody on the Ukranian steamer Batoum, which 
I could see from our ward window, moored opposite 
the Sultan's Palace of Dolma Bagtche. 

Every request that we might be permitted to visit 
the shops was refused, and when White asked to see a 
dentist in Constantinople he was referred to the military 
dentist in the hospital. We had almost decided to 
leave for Psamatia before our time, when chance pro- 
vided a way out. 

My fame as a teacher of English had spread through 
the hospital. Aziz Bey, a young Turkish doctor, ar- 
rived at my bedside one morning, with text-books and 
a request for lessons. I agreed willingly, and in a few 
days became quite friendly with him over conjugations, 
and references to the green socks worn by the son of the 
gardener. 

At that time intelligent Turks, many of whom hated 
the Germans worse even than they hated the Armen- 
ians, were just beginning to realize that the Allies might 
well win the war. In a conversation Aziz Bey referred 
to this possibility, and expressed admiration for the 
British. In particular he praised a man named Meester 
Djavid Loijorge, who, it appeared, was the principal 



i 7 o EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

leader of the Allies. Djavid Loijorge, declared Aziz 
Bey, was a very great man indeed. 

It was then that, without any forethought, an in- 
spiration came to me. Remembering the fear inspired 
in all Turks by such despotic ministers as Talaat Pasha 
and Enver Pasha, and realizing the consideration that 
would be paid to any connection of the British Prime 
Minister, whom Aziz Bey would regard as a kind of 
western Talaat Pasha, I announced : 

"Mr. David Lloyd George is a very great man indeed, 
and I am his second cousin." 

"Really?" said Aziz after a taken-aback pause, with 
credulity and obvious respect. "I never expected to 
learn English from a relative of Meester Loijorge." 

I hastened to explain that the matter was confiden- 
tial, and must not be talked about, as I did not wish the 
Turkish Ministry of War to know it. I relied upon 
him, as a friend, to keep the relationship secret. He 
promised, and as far as I know only broke the promise 
to the extent of telling four or five or ten or twelve 
friends of his, all of whom treated me with the greatest 
consideration. 

Now I am neither a second cousin of Mr. David 
Lloyd George nor anxious for such relationship. But 
in view of the curious circumstances, I was bold enough 
to believe that the statesman would not have objected 
to the claim. It needed little persuasion to induce 
Aziz Bey to take Mr. Lloyd George's second cousin 
into Constantinople whenever he had a free after- 
noon; and the chief doctor, who was let into the secret, 
gave the required permission readily enough. 

Aziz and another doctor, whose name I forget, invited 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 171 

me to tea at the Tokatlian Hotel and the Petits Champs 
Gardens, took me for sails on the Bosphorus and the 
Sea of Marmora, and introduced me, after preliminary 
whisperings, to several of their friends. 

Fortunately for me the news from the Western front 
was then taking a turn for the better. Hindenburg's 
great drive was expended, the Germans had been 
thrown back across the Marne. With each day's tele- 
grams Mr. Lloyd George's second cousin gained further 
respect; and finally he was given permission to visit the 
shops of Pera, escorted only by a guard. 

I walked over the bridge across the Golden Horn to 
the Maritza restaurant, and there was fortunate enough 
to find Prince Constantine AvalofF. He was making in- 
quiries, he said, among the officers of the Batoum, and 
he thought that, for a suitable bribe, they would be 
quite willing, when the ship left for Odessa, to take 
White and myself as stowaways. The Batoum was 
expected to leave in about three weeks' time. 

From AvalofF, who was still in touch with Yeats- 
Brown and Paul, I heard of their adventures after es- 
caping from Psamatia. Yeats-Brown was still at large 
in the city, dressed in girl's clothes lent him by Miss 
Whittaker. Paul, from whom AvalofF had just re- 
ceived a letter, was trekking toward the Gulf of Enos 
with a young Greek waiter from the Maritza as guide. 
They hoped to put to sea from near Enos, accompanied 
by a Greek boatman. Paul, who spoke Arabic fluently, 
was dressed as an Arab. I remembered the tuft of 
unkempt beard which he had been growing before his 
escape, and now saw the reason for it. 

Meanwhile, a party that included Yeats-Brown and 



172 EASTERN NIGHTS—AND FLIGHTS 

two Turkish officers was waiting in Constantinople on 
the result of Paul's attempt. If he succeeded, said 
Avaloff, they would follow in his tracks, and the Greek 
boatman would return to the Gulf of Enos for them. 

White and I decided, out of consideration for Miss 
Whittaker, not to ask her for any help, as we heard that 
since the escape of Paul and Yeats-Brown she had been 
closely watched. The Turkish police suspected her 
connivance, especially when they learned that she had 
met them in the park at Stamboul on the day before 
they left Psamatia. On the following Sunday morning, 
when, for the first time in three weeks, we were allowed 
to attend service in the English Church at Pera, we 
took care never to look in her direction, not knowing 
whether one of Constantinople's myriad informers 
might be among the congregation. 

For the moment our greatest problem was to obtain 
funds. We hoped to find a banker in Mr. S., the Eng- 
lish merchant who, on his own responsibility and at 
great risk to himself, had several times cashed large 
cheques for officers who wanted to escape. We knew 
several Armenian and Greek merchants, but these we 
could not induce to supply us with money, as we had no 
orthodox cheque-books. Such cheques as we cashed 
on the Dutch Legation, or on Mr. S., were written on 
sheets of blank paper. 

In those days British bombers from Mudros and 
Imbros were visiting Constantinople every fine moonlit 
night, and spreading great terror all over the city. 
Whenever an alarm, false or real, was given, we were 
wakened by the firing of scores of machine-guns planted 
on the near-by roofs. Turkish soldiers, who, next to 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 173 

food and wives, love fireworks better than anything on 
earth, would continue firing into the vacant air for 
hours, until all their ammunition was exhausted, merely 
for the pleasure of hearing the rap-rapping. Except on 
one occasion the bombs themselves did little damage; 
but many people were killed by the chance-falling bul- 
lets from the machine-guns. 

Sometimes the aeroplanes came during the daytime; 
and then, anxious to see some of our own machines, we 
would race into the garden while the Turks were scurry- 
ing from it into the shelter of the hospital. Once a very 
fat Turkish pasha, with paunch and dignity well to the 
fore, paid Gumuch Souyou a visit of inspection and hap- 
pened to be in the middle of the garden when the anti- 
aircraft firing began. He cast off the dignity, and 
would doubtless have liked to cast off the paunch, as 
he raced for the hospital door and inquired for the un- 
derground baths. 

The Turkish love of fireworks was useful to me during 
the Mohammedan month of Ramazan, At each sun- 
set guns were fired and puff-balls were exploded, at 
interval of a few seconds, all round Constantinople. 
Whenever I went into the city with Aziz Bey I ar- 
ranged that we should be at sunset near Taxim Gar- 
dens, opposite which some puff-balls were exploded. 
On the first explosion I started violently and began to 
tremble, then continued to swerve and shiver at each 
subsequent noise. Having returned to Gumuch Sou- 
you I would demand aspirin and bromide to calm my 
nerves, which — as Azid Bey could bear witness — must 
still be in bad condition. This I did because a few days 
earlier it had been suggested that I was now in a fit 



174 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

state to return to a prisoners' camp; whereas we were 
still a fortnight from the opening date of rendezvous 
with John Willie the Bosnian, and from the time when 
the Batourn might be expected to weigh anchor. 

But ill-luck disbanded the queer company in the pris- 
oners' ward of Gumuch Souyou Hospital early in the 
following week. On the Sunday afternoon, after our 
visit to the church, White, R., and I visited some of my 
newly made friends, in a street behind the Tokatlian. 
Our two guards, bribed for the purpose and placated with 
a promise that we would return to them in an hour's 
time, loafed outside the doorway. One of the city's 
innumerable police spies saw us handing over a fifty- 
piastre note, and having by inquiries discovered 
that we were British officers, reported the incident to 
the War Office. Next morning all but the two mad- 
men were ordered to Psamatia, at an hour's notice. 

White and I were not disappointed at the change for 
it now wanted but a week to August the 7th, when at 
three o'clock in the morning we might expect to meet 
John Willie the Bosnian at the corner of a wood outside 
San Stefano aerodrome. Meanwhile, there remained 
the urgent necessity of cashing some cheques on Mr. 
S.; for only ready money could make possible our es- 
cape, whether we flew to Mudros or crossed the Black 
Sea as stowaways on the Batourn. 



CHAPTER X 

THE THIRD AND FOURTH FAILURES 

"The clothes of the Capitaine Sir Paul," demanded with 
triumphant satisfaction Zikki Bey, the one-eyed Turk- 
ish officer at Psamatia prison. "The Capitaine Sir 
Paul needs the clothes he left here, because he finds 
that his Arab dress is unsuitable for the Ministry of 
War prison." 

For the past two days we had heard rumours of Paul's 
recapture. Yet Zikki Bey's unwelcome confirmation, 
as he broke in upon a bridge party one evening, was a 
shock to us. The cards were abandoned as we pre- 
pared clothes and food to be sent to whatever cell of the 
infamous "Black Hole of Constantinople" Paul might 
have been taken, still dressed in the Arab disguise in 
which he tried to reach the Gulf of Enos. 

The bad news was an especial blow to four of us — 
White, Fulton, Stone, and myself — for we ourselves 
were preparing to bolt within a few days. Others 
regarded it more philosophically. Among the party 
was a certain Colonel who deprecated attempts to es- 
cape, because they reacted on one's fellow-prisoners. 
He also contended that it was impossible for a Britisher 
to escape from Turkey. 

"I knew it, I knew it," he now said; "they've nabbed 
Paul, and soon they'll nab Yeats-Brown." 

1 75 



176 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

A few days later, having heard that certain others 
were ready to flit, the Colonel delivered an ultimatum. 
Already the restrictions at Psamatia were severe, be- 
cause of the disappearance of Paul and Yeats-Brown. 
If others went, he contended, life would not be worth 
living, especially for middle-aged colonels who had pre- 
pared medical histories of well-imagined ailments and 
were hoping to see their names on the list of prisoners 
to be exchanged as unfit. 

"After the war I'll heng, draw, and quarter the next 
fellow who clears off from Psamatia while I'm here," 
he told Fulton, Stone, and myself, slapping a knee that 
rested on the garden wall. "A successful escape can't 
be done in Turkey, and it's futile to try." 

Five days later four of us did clear off from Psamatia. 
The war is over long since; but for some reason or other 
we remain unhenged, undrawn, and unquartered. As 
for the pronouncement that to escape from Turkey was 
impossible, within six weeks no less than ten men proved 
the contrary. 

White and I had been at Psamatia for ten days. Al- 
though expeditions to Stamboul were now forbidden, 
we managed to go there three times, on the pretence of 
seeing a dentist. We visited Theodore, and through 
him received from Mr. S. about three hundred Turkish 
pounds in return for foolscap-paper cheques. 

After very careful consideration we had chosen the 
plan of crossing the Black Sea as stowaways, in pref- 
erence to that of trusting John Willie the Bosnian 
aviator to fly us out of the country. Since his sudden 
disappearance from the hospital we had heard no defi- 
nite word of him; unless, indeed, a rumour that a Bos- 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 177 

nian officer was in the Ministry of War Prison as a 
political suspect applied to him. 

Moreover, he either failed to give us the signal that 
he was ready, or gave it otherwise than according to 
plan. On the Sunday morning preceding the first 
date of the rendezvous outside San Stefano aerodrome 
he was to have flown over Psamatia on a Nieuport scout 
and performed stunts to attract our attention. An 
aeroplane did fly over Psamatia, and even looped the 
loop several times; but it was a big two-seater instead 
of a little Nieuport. Under the circumstances we de- 
cided not to risk losing the comparative certainty of a 
slow journey to freedom via Russia for the dubious un- 
certainty of a quick flight to Mudros. 

Fulton and Stone were glad enough to inherit our 
arrangements with John Willie, and to take the chance 
of meeting him at San Stefano. Now that Paul was 
captured they were at a loose end, for if he had suc- 
ceeded they would have followed in his footsteps by 
joining the second party that was to make for the Gulf 
of Enos. I gave them my map of the aerodrome, show- 
ing the place of rendezvous, and also a non-committal 
note, scribbled in German, which would explain their 
identity if they met the Bosnian. 

For White and myself a passage on the tramp steamer 
Batoum was definitely arranged. Prince Avaloff had 
shown himself to be a too-talkative intermediary; but 
White met a more useful man in one Lieutenant Vladi- 
mir Stepanovitch Wilkowsky, a Polish aviator whom he 
had known at Afion-kara-Hissar, and who was also 
planning an early escape. Unlike us, the Russians 
were still allowed into Stamboul with their guards. 



i;8 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Having placated his own particular guard with a bribe, 
Wilkowsky often crossed the Golden Horn alone. Sev- 
eral times he met Titoff, the Batoum's chief engineer, 
in cafes at Galata; and finally, after much bargaining, 
completed arrangements whereby White and I were to 
travel as stowaways. He himself was also planning 
an escape to Odessa. 

Zikki Bey warned us that everybody at Psamatia 
would be sent into Anatolia very shortly. White, Ful- 
ton, Stone, and I went into conference, and decided to 
forestall the removal by making our dash two days later, 
on August the twenty-first. This suited Fulton and 
Stone, for it would bring them to the period named by 
the Bosnian aviator. As for White and myself, a hiding- 
place in Pera, where we could remain until the Batoum 
sailed, had been arranged by TitoflF. A Russian civil- 
ian was to conceal us; and, after giving our guards the 
slip, we were to meet him by appointment at a beer- 
house in the Rue de Galata. 

On the morning of July the twenty-first all four of 
us left Psamatia by the ten o'clock train on the little 
suburban railway that runs between Stamboul and San 
Stefano. It would be less difficult to dodge the guards 
if we were in two parties, so Fulton and Stone chose an 
optician as their excuse for a trip to Stamboul, while 
White and I were to visit our old friend the dentist. 
Our real destination was the beerhouse in the Rue de 
Galata, that of the other pair being the small wood out- 
side San Stefano. 

We split up into twos as the train steamed up, Ful- 
ton's farewell being "Good-bye, old man. See you in 
the Ministry of War to-morrow!" He and Stone went 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 179 

into a compartment near the engine, while White and 
I chose the rear end of the train. All of us hoped to 
lose our guards among the crowd at Stamboul station. 

Ten minutes before we should have reached Stam- 
boul station the god of coincidence sent an extraordi- 
nary opportunity. Just beyond Koum-kapou the 
train rounded a sharp corner, and ran into some empty 
trucks that were stationary on the line. There was a 
succession of clangs, a violent shock, and many a jolt 
and jar, mingled with screams, gasps, and frightened 
confusion. 

One of the two guards with White and I fell on to 
an iron platform between two carriages. The other, 
unfortunately, kept both his balance and his head. I 
was standing a yard in front of him, behind White. 

"Now's our chance. Fm off!" said White as he 
pushed his way through the struggling passengers to 
the farther end of the compartment. I began to follow, 
but seeing that the guard was already suspicious of 
White's movements, I slowed down, and pretended to 
pacify a nervous woman, thus blocking the guard's 
advance and allowing White more room. 

"He's after you," I called, as White turned his head. 

In the confusion White misunderstood these words 
as "I'm with you." Thinking that I was ready to 
follow him, he edged his way to the steps at the far end 
of the compartment. The guard, meanwhile, shouted 
a warning to his companion, who had picked himself 
up and left the train. This second guard ran toward 
White along the railway embankment. 

White was wearing a cap. In his inside pocket he 
had a felt hat, his idea being to change headgear in a 



180 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

crowd, so that the guards, looking for a man with a cap, 
would fail to notice him. I now saw him fling the cap 
under the carriage, jamb the felt hat on his head, de- 
scend from the train and jump down the embankment. 
The guard with me yelled, while the second Turkish 
soldier leaped down the embankment, clutched at 
White, and almost caught him. 

White dodged clear, and the last I saw of him that 
day was as he raced down a narrow, winding street, 
pulling and pushing out of his way the Turks and Greeks 
who streamed in the opposite direction, towards the scene 
of the collision. Close behind him the guard gave chase, 
while commanding passers-by to stop the British prisoner. 

I jumped down the embankment, partly in a desper- 
ate attempt to elude the other guard, and partly to 
create a diversion for White. At the bottom of the 
slope I twisted an ankle and fell. My guard dropped 
on top of me. We scrambled to our feet, myself un- 
stable on the weak ankle, and the Turk clutching my 
right arm with both his hands. Under the circum- 
stances it was useless to struggle. I remained quiet, 
while the guard called to his aid a passing soldier. 

I stood at the bottom of the embankment, gripped 
painfully by the two Turks. The moments that fol- 
lowed were indescribably bitter. White was probably 
at liberty, with the glorious prospect of a successful 
escape. I had failed, for the third time since capture, 
and was probably booked for a cell under the Turkish 
Ministry of War. My one consolation, my one hope, 
was in the wads of money distributed among various 
parts of my clothing. These would provide a chance 
to bribe the guards into silence, leaving me free for 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 



181 



another attempt before the British prisoners at Psama- 
tia were moved to Anatolia. 

The three of us remained thus for ten minutes, an 
unregarded island in the sea of people that surged round 
the derailed coaches. The shaken passengers were 
climbing down the slope, the new arrivals were climb- 
ing up it to see the wreckage. A few yards away first 
aid was being administered to an injured woman. ; 

Presently I saw Fulton and Stone, with their guards 
approaching from the front of the train. They stopped 
short on seeing me held by two soldiers. I shook my 
head and signalled them not to come any nearer, where- 
upon they turned away. 

The guard who had chased White returned, alter- 
nately cursing and invoking the wrath of Allah on all 
Englishmen. In his anger he took off his cloth hat, 
threw it on the ground, shook his fist at me, and said, 
" English very bad!" 

Although White had eluded him he did not give up 
hope at once, but led us through a maze of alleys and 
streets, peering forlornly into the doorways of shops 
and houses and through the gratings of cellars. Fin- 
ally he held a conference with his companions, and de- 
termined to take me to Koum-kapou police station. 
My ankle, I was glad to find, had been ricked only 
slightly, and was now normal again. 

"English very bad," said the man who had chased 
White, in the clipped Turkish used between prisoners 
and guards. "We" — pointing to himself and my own 
guard — "prison. Prison very bad. No food." 

"Here is food for prison," I consoled him, handing 
over two Turkish pounds. 



182 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

The sight of money partly pacified them, and their 
anger cooled. Soon they were in a fit state of mind to 
talk baksheesh, that touchstone of the Turkish char- 
acter. 

I produced ten more banknotes, each of one Turk- 
ish pound. Again using pidgin-Turkish, with many 
an expressive gesture, I offered them to the guards, on 
condition that when we reached the police station they 
would say that although White had escaped I made no 
attempt to do so. 

The matter needed several minutes of explanation 
before misunderstandings were cleared up, so that we 
withdrew into a side street. The two guards needed 
little persuasion to make them accept. Thereupon the 
third man (the soldier who helped to hold me at the 
bottom of the embankment) demanded a share. To 
satisfy him I was forced to produce a further sum of 
five Turkish pounds. He saluted and left us. 

The two guards carried on an animated talk for some 
time longer, and, as far as I could understand, discussed 
what tale to the police would show them in the best 
light. They decided, apparently, not to admit having 
seen White escape and let him give them the slip, but 
to claim that he vanished when we were all knocked 
down by the collision. 

I remembered that the food supplies in my pockets 
might be incriminating evidence. I had, also, a danger- 
ous slip of paper, on which Wilkowsky had drawn a plan 
of the Galata beerhouse in which I was to meet TitofFs 
Russian friend. This I disposed of by tearing it into 
shreds behind my back, and dropping the fragments, 
a few at a time, as in a paper chase. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 183 

The packets of food were rather more difficult to lose. 
There was a tin of Oxo cubes, which I flung surrepti- 
tiously on to a dust-heap. Some sticks of bivouac 
chocolate I left on a convenient windowsill. The 
worst problem was a small bag containing a mixture 
of cocoa and grape-nuts, taken from one of White's 
parcels from home. I could scarcely throw this away 
unobserved; and the police station was already in sight. 

A woman stood in the doorway, and gazed at us. 
As we brushed past her on the narrow pavement, I took 
the bag from my pocket, dumped it into her hand, and 
moved on without a word or a sign. When, from a few 
yards ahead, I looked back, she had opened the bag 
and was staring in wide-eyed surprise at the cocoa — 
then quite unobtainable in Constantinople — which had 
fallen as from heaven. 

The guards told a rambling tale to the police officer, 
who took notes of their description of White and sent 
out three gendarmes to search the streets for him. After- 
ward I was taken into an inner room and searched. 
Nothing was found to brand me as a suspect. The 
pockets were quite empty; and my larger banknotes — 
one of a hundred Turkish pounds, one of fifty, and one 
of twenty-five — were undiscovered, being sewn into 
suspenders and braces. 

Finally, as a result of the twelve Turkish pounds' 
worth of good character given me by the guards, I 
continued the journey to the military dentist in Stam- 
boul, after a guard had telephoned the news of White's 
disappearance to Psamatia. 

Desperate after my failure in face of White's success, 
I made an unwise bolt for freedom across the ruins of a 



i8 4 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

recent fire. Before the guards had recovered from 
their surprise, I reached a half-demolished wall at the 
far end of an open space. I shinned over the wall, and 
found myself in a blind alley. Straight ahead was a 
house; and another building cut off the exit to the right. 
To the left was a bare wall, too high to be climbed. I 
turned round, walked back to meet the now furious 
guards, and handed them another pound note apiece. 
They gasped; but a sense of humour dissolved their 
rage into laughter. 

We continued to walk toward Stamboul, each of 
my arms now being held tightly. Several times I 
heard the guards mention Theodore, so that I was not 
surprised when they led me into a small cafe near the 
quay (the Maritza restaurant being then out of 
bounds for prisoners), where one of them stayed with 
me while the other fetched the Greek waiter to act as 
interpreter. 

"First," said Theodore after he had listened to the 
guards' story, "you must give parole for the rest of the 
day/' 

I agreed readily enough; and over pots of beer — I 
only met one Mohammedan guard whose religious prin- 
ciples prevented him from accepting alcoholic drink 
in a secluded spot — the party became more amiable. 
The Turks' object in fetching Theodore was that he 
might explain to me a story which would saddle them 
with a minimum of blame for White's escape. If I 
corroborated this yarn they would agree not to mention 
my own misdeeds to the commandant at Psamatia. 
Again I accepted. 

We discussed and amended the story, which in its 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 185 

final form was divided into four parts — (1) a train col- 
lision; (2) a shock that knocked the four of us over and 
separated guards from prisoners; (3) the confusion; (4) 
the discovery that White had disappeared, unknown to 
the rest of the party. 

Through Theodore I now offered the guards fifty 
Turkish pounds if they would turn their backs and let 
me walk out alone. They refused regretfully, saying 
that to lose two prisoners in one day would be as much 
as their lives were worth. They reminded me of my 
promise, and we left the cafe for the dentist's surgery, 
where I was obliged to allow a perfectly sound tooth 
to be stopped. 

Back at Psamatia I found all the prisoners shut up 
in their rooms. The Turkish commandant was raving 
with rage. As we entered the arched doorway he 
rushed from his office, and boxed the guards' ears. 
They bore it without a sound, comforted no doubt 
by the six Turkish pounds which each of them had con- 
cealed in his clothing. 

We told our separate but corroborative tales, how 
we had been knocked over by the shock and missed 
White in the confusion. White was queer in the head, 
I explained; and it was possible that having been fur- 
ther unbalanced by the collision he wandered away, 
not knowing where he was going. The commandant, 
ready to clutch at anything that might save his official 
knuckles from a rapping, affected to take the suggestion 
seriously, and embodied it in his report. He affected 
to hope that White would recover memory and senses, 
and return of his own free will. 

Later that evening the commandant, after tele- 



1 86 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

phonic communication with the Ministry of War, 
ordered all the British prisoners to prepare for a journey 
into Anatolia on the following day. With Fulton and 
Stone, who returned from their visit to the optician 
without having had a chance to escape, I conferred on 
how we could get clear in the short time left to us. 

Fulton and Stone planned to leave the prison-house 
during the night, but I decided to wait until morning. 
They wanted to leave Constantinople for San Stefano, 
whereas I wanted to remain in the city; and if I es- 
caped before dawn I should have nowhere to spend the 
night hours, and so lay myself open to the curiosity of 
gendarmes. In any case, I was uncertain whether or 
not my parole, given to the guards, ought to extend till 
midnight. 

The three of us occupied the same bedroom. A 
small window from the adjoining lavatory opened on to 
a drainpipe. It was decided that Fulton should climb 
up this pipe to the roof, until he was firmly established 
on the gutter. Stone would hand him a rope and their 
boots, and then himself climb the drainpipe. They 
would crawl along a succession of roofs, keeping in the 
shadow, until they reached the top of a house about 
fifty yards distant, which overlooked a side street out- 
side the camp sentries' range of vision. Having fas- 
tened the rope to a chimney or to some other stable 
object, they could let themselves down to the road 
when it was conveniently deserted, with the boots 
slung round their necks. They planned to tramp the 
fifteen miles to San Stefano during the night, leaving 
Constantinople via the gate at Yedi-kuli. 

That evening the sentries in the yard, stimulated 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 187 

by White's escape, were more alert than usual. Another 
drawback was the full moon, which for some hours lit 
up the corner outside the window. Not until just be- 
fore midnight were conditions, in the form of shadow 
and an absent guard, suitable for the adventure. 

With feet covered only by a pair of thick socks Ful- 
ton climbed through the tiny window, gripped a bend 
of the drainpipe, and made use of a metal joint for foot- 
hold. Stone, holding the rope and the boots, watched 
from the window. Fulton gripped the gutter and was 
beginning to haul himself up when — crunch! — the top 
of the flimsy drainpipe was severed from the roof by 
his weight, and he fell. 

Instinctively he released his feet from the joint on 
which they had been resting. He thus managed to 
land on all fours in the yard, about fifteen feet below. 

The noise, however, was startling. Stone and I ex- 
pected every second that Fulton would be discovered, 
but with great presence of mind he jumped up and ran 
into our room, through the near-by door, before any- 
body had time to investigate. 

An upper window opened noisily, and from it a Turk- 
ish officer, awakened by the sound of Fulton's fall, 
yelled to the guards. Within five minutes the yard was 
full of a disordered commotion. An excited group col- 
lected round the portion of the drainpipe which was 
lying on the ground. 

Meanwhile, Fulton and Stone had torn off their outer 
clothing. When Zikki-Bey paid us a visit of suspicious 
inspection, the three of us were seemingly asleep. Soon 
afterward the chattering and clattering in the yard 
subsided. Fortunately a strong wind was blowing, 



1 88 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

and we heard afterward that the Turks' thought a vio- 
lent gust must have dislodged the drainpipe. 

With nerves on edge and all our faculties keyed up, 
there was little sleep for the rest of that night. Our 
only remaining chance was to escape next morning, 
when we passed through the city on the way to the rail- 
way station. 



CHAPTER XI 

A GREEK WAITRESS, A GERMAN BEERHOUSE, A TURKISH 
POLICEMAN, AND A RUSSIAN SHIP 

At half-past eleven of a scorching morning every 
Britisher at Psamatia marched away from the prison- 
house. As a result of the furore that followed White's 
escape, twenty-four hours earlier, the Turks were send- 
ing us into the interior of Anatolia. About fifty Tom- 
mies, with a detachment of guards, left first; and we — 
the fifteen officer prisoners — followed twenty yards 
behind them. In the rear was the Turkish officer in 
charge, with a screen of six guards, who showed fixed 
bayonets, loaded rifles, and smiling ferocity. 

Three of us — Fulton, Stone, and myself — had made 
up our minds to slip away, or if needs be dash away, 
before the party entrained at Haidar Pasha, on the 
Asiatic shore of the Sea of Marmora. The Turkish 
officer rather expected somebody to make an attempt, 
but knew not whom to suspect in particular. A little 
deduction might have told him, for, except F., the 
"do-or-die trio" — as the others had named us — were 
the only officers wearing civilian clothes, and one would 
as easily have suspected F. of an ambition to become 
the Sultan's chief eunuch as of an ambition to escape. 

Some of the Tommies were disabled or still sick. As 
they trudged through the hot streets, oppressed by 

189 



190 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

heavy packages and the relentless heat, their backs 
bent lower and lower and they began to straggle. Fi- 
nally one man fainted. While he was being carried into 
the shade the officers obtained permission to relieve the 
weakest Tommies of their kits. Yet again, the Turks 
ought to have discovered the escape party, for the 
others saw to it that Fulton, Stone, and I should not be 
burdened with the parcels. 

Meanwhile, the mid-day heat grew more intense, and 
the Tommies more exhausted. It became necessary, 
every half mile or so, to rest for a few minutes on the 
shady side of the street. 

The "do-or-die trio" looked to these halts for their 
opportunity; but always the guards hemmed us in too 
closely for any chance of a break-away. A combined 
effort seemed impossible, so that the three of us ac- 
cepted the maxim of each man for himself. Even to 
talk with each other on the march was imprudent, for 
earnest conversation, like earnest looks, must have at- 
tracted attention. 

The first move was made by Fulton. We had halted 
on a narrow pavement, in the suburb of Yeni-Kapou. 
There followed a short interval of lounging repose, dur- 
ing which we sipped at water-bottles, while the Turkish 
officer did his best to fraternize. Turning round cas- 
ually, in a search for possible opportunities, I saw Ful- 
ton sliding into a little booth of a shop, and then, with 
head bent over the counter, looking at postcards. As 
far as I could gather none of the guards had noticed him. 
He killed time by calling for more and ever more post- 
cards. 

Five minutes later the order to continue was given. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 191 

We rose and arranged our packs, while Ms. stood in 
front of the shop window, so as to hide Fulton. But a 
Turkish sergeant counted us, and finding our number 
short by one, became excited and aggressive as he 
wandered around and checked his figures. Fulton's 
discovery was then inevitable. He made the best of 
things, when observed through the window, by choos- 
ing and paying for several postcards and leaving the 
shop indifferently, as if he had entered it with no ul- 
terior purpose. The Turkish officer looked his suspi- 
cion, but made no comments. 

Stone's turn came next. At Koum-kapou we rested 
below the wall of an old palace. When, as he thought, 
nobody was looking, Stone slipped through a side- 
entrance and sat down against a doorway in the left- 
hand corner of the courtyard. A guard darted after 
him, and dragged him back to us. The Turkish offi- 
cer saw the commotion and wanted explanations; 
whereupon Stone complained that although he went 
into the courtyard merely to find shelter from the sun 
the guard had hustled him rudely. The watchful guard 
was reprimanded for want of politeness. 

We passed from Koum-kapou to Stamboul, where 
crowds of befezzed men and veiled women gathered 
at every crossing to gaze their dull-eyed curiosity. 
Here, in the mazed streets of the Turkish quarter, I 
again petitioned Providence for some sort of a diver- 
sion, under cover of which we might run. But nothing 
happened. The guards surrounded us as if we had 
been wayward pigs being driven to the slaughter-house, 
and handled their bayonets suggestively. 

At one point we could see the Maritza, down a side 



192 EASTERN NIGHTS-AND FLIGHTS 

turning. We moved along the tram-lines toward the 
big bridge. Then, after a moment's delay at the toll- 
gate, we passed over the Golden Horn. 

Three-quarters of the way across the bridge the 
Turkish sergeant leading us switched the column-head 
to some steps descending to the ferry stage for the Hai- 
dar Pasha steamboats. The Tommies were placed at 
one end of the wooden stage, with a separate group of 
guards, while the Turkish officer, who since the be- 
ginning of the journey had shown a desire to make him- 
self pleasant, took the officer-prisoners into a little cafe 
for cooling drinks. We talked idly to the Greek wait- 
ress who served us; but at the moment I was too pre- 
occupied to notice anything about her, except that she 
was plump and obliging. 

Later we were grouped some distance to the left of 
the cafe, in a corner of the ferry stage opposite that oc- 
cupied by the Tommies. There we remained for nearly 
an hour in the broiling sun, while waiting for the steamer 
which was to take us from Europe to Asia. People 
surged on and off the ferryboats that moored opposite 
us from time to time; but never once did the guards 
relax enough to allow anybody to fade into the crowd. 
The chances were made even more desperate by some 
German soldiers, who leaned over the bridge-rails above 
us and watched the changing scene. 

"Our ship comes," announced the Turkish officer at 
last, pointing out to sea in the direction of Prinkipo 
Island. In five minutes' time, I knew, the party would be 
on board that steamer; and once aboard it I should have 
left behind all hope of escape from captivity in Turkey. 
Only five minutes ! Had the gods left no loop-hole ? 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 193 

I searched among the crowd in every direction, ready- 
to take advantage of the wildest and slimmest scheme 
that might suggest itself. 

I heard Pappas Effendi and Fulton asking the Turk- 
ish officer if they might return to fetch some kit, which 
had been left in the cafe. The Turk nodded, and sent 
them away, escorted by his sergeant. I also had left 
some kit, I claimed on the spur of the moment, just as 
Pappas Effendi and Fulton were leaving us. 

"All right," said the Turk, "follow your comrades." 

In full view of the rest of the party I walked after 
Pappas Effendi and Fulton, and while keeping close to 
the sergeant, as if to show I was under his wing, took 
care to remain behind him so that he himself should 
know nothing of my presence. 

The little group entered the cafe, first Pappas Effendi 
and Fulton, then the sergeant, and finally myself. 

Inside the doorway was the plump waitress, who 
smiled affably. I stayed near her while the other three 
passed to the inside room, where we had been seated 
earlier. I fingered my lips warningly, and in soft- 
spoken French asked where I could hide. 

The waitress gave no answer, but without showing 
the least excitement or even surprise, half opened a 
folding doorway that led to the kitchen. I planted 
myself behind it, while she entered the inner room and 
talked to the Turkish sergeant. 

A minute later I heard the three of them — Pappas 
Effendi, Fulton, and the guard — tramp past my doorway 
and out to the ferry stage. Just then the arriving 
steamer hooted. 

"Now," said this waitress-in-a-million, "they have 



i 9 4 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

gone, and so must you. The Turks may come any 
moment, and if they find you here I shall suffer more 
than you." 

"Goodbye, and a million thanks," I said, fervently, 
and walked into the open. 

Without even turning my head to see whether the 
disappearance was known I swerved to the right, and, 
taking great care not to attract attention by walking 
in haste, passed up the long line of steps leading to the 
bridge. I continued to look straight ahead, but I 
could sense the presence, only a few yards away, of 
the German soldiers who loitered by the railings. For- 
tunately, several other people were moving up or down 
the steps; and dressed as I was in a civilian suit ob- 
tained from the Dutch Legation, the Germans paid no 
more attention to me than to them. 

I reached the pavement, and still not daring to look 
behind, crossed the tram-lines to the opposite side of 
the bridge. Then only did I turn round to find out 
whether I were followed. 

Everything was normal. Not one of the idlers who 
lined the railings had noticed me; the usual traffic and 
the usual crowds ebbed and flowed across the bridge; 
the sun shone. I lit a cigarette and walked eastward. 

Having crossed the circus of streets at the Galata 
end of the bridge, I turned to the right and made for 
the Rue de Galata. At the corner I looked back again. 
To my very great relief, I found that I was still not 
followed. 

I was conscious of an intense exhilaration as, free at 
last, I rubbed elbows with the crowd of nondescript 
Levantines. It was the first time for months that I 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 195 

had ever walked the streets without the burden of an 
oppressive consciousness that a yard or two to the rear 
was an animal of a Turkish soldier. That sense of al- 
ways being followed and spied upon and menaced and 
held on a leash had weighed so much on my mind that 
I had come to look upon a guard in the same light as an 
old-time convict must have looked upon the lead ball 
chained to his foot. The sense of freedom from this 
incubus was glorious. 

I was worried about my chances of meeting the un- 
known Russian who had agreed to hide White and my- 
self. According to the plan detailed to me some hours 
earlier by Vladimir Wilkowsky, he was to wait for me 
in a German beerhouse from two o'clock to four. I 
had been unable to escape in time for the appointment 
and it was now four-twenty. 

Nevertheless, hoping that the Russian might have 
lingered over his drink, I decided to carry out the same 
arrangements as if I had arrived in time. These, I 
remember thinking as I strolled along the Rue de 
Galata, studiously unconscious of gendarmes and sol- 
diers, were suggestive of a Deadwood Dick thriller, or 
of some sawdust melodrama at a provincial theatre. 

Having entered the beerhouse (named Zum Neuen 
Welt), I was to pass down the main room until, on the 
right-hand side of it, I reached the piano. I must seat 
myself at the table next to the piano, order a glass of 
beer, put a cigarette behind my left ear, and look around 
without showing too much anxiety. 

Somewhere near me I should find a man whose left 
ear, also, was adorned with a cigarette; or, if not al- 
ready there he would arrive very shortly. He would 



196 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

occupy the table beyond mine — that is to say, the next 
but one to the piano. On no account must I speak to 
him in the beerhouse, although to make his identity 
doubly clear he might ask for a light, speaking in Ger- 
man. He would remain until I had paid my reckoning, 
then pay his own, leave the Bierhaus Zum Neuen 
Welt, and walk toward Pera. 

I was to follow him not too closely, always taking 
care to be separated by a distance of at least twenty 
yards, so that nobody might observe how my move- 
ments depended on his. Arrived on the fringe of Pera 
he would unlock a door, leave it open, and disappear; 
whereupon all that remained for me was to follow him 
into this retreat, where I should find Captain White 
already installed. 

It was four-twenty-seven when I entered the Bier- 
haus Zum Neuen Welt, a close-atmosphered cafe in 
the Rue de Galata. The customers inside it were few, 
but some of them caught my attention at once, for they 
included a group of German soldiers and a Turkish 
officer of gendarmerie, who was talking to a civilian. 
The table next to the piano was vacant, as were those 
surrounding it. I sat down, casually placed a cigarette 
behind my left ear, and ordered a glass of beer. 

As I sipped the beer I looked around the room for the 
man of mystery. Nobody paid the least attention to 
me. Plenty of cigarettes were held in the hand or the 
mouth, but none in the cleft of the left ear. 

Still with a faint hope that the Russian who was to 
hide me might return, I ordered a second then a third 
glass of beer, and made a study of every man present, in 
case one of them might be he. But nothing had hap- 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 197 

pened, and nothing continued to happen. The officer 
of gendarmerie kept his back toward me, while the 
German soldiers grew boisterous over repeated relays 
of beer, and over mandolin strummings by a red-faced 
Unteroffizier. The proprietress, a German woman of 
an especial corpulence, dragged her fleshy body from 
table to table, and finally arrived before mine. 

"You seem hot," she said in German. "You must 
have been walking too fast." 

"No, I have merely been out in this atrocious sun." 

"German?" she asked — at which I was delighted, for 
it proved that my accent, acquired many years before 
as a student in Munich, was not yet too rusty to pass 
muster. 

"No, madam, Russian," I replied, hoping hard that 
she could speak no Russian. 

"So/ Plenty of Russians come here since the 
Ukraine was occupied, and the boats began to arrive 
from Odessa." 

Now although the fat proprietress had paid such a 
compliment to my German accent, I remembered the 
five years since I had spoken the language continuously, 
and I was frightened that in any word she might detect 
an English accent. I grew more and more frightened 
and anxious, for it was very unlikely that the man with 
the cigarette would arrive now. I looked at my watch, 
and found the time to be five-twenty-five. 

Finally the tension of trying to think clearly while 
answering the German female's questions was more 
than I could stand. I paid my bill, and returned to 
the Rue de Galata. 

By now, I judged, the guards must have discovered 



i 9 8 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

my escape. Probably they were searching the streets 
for me; and probably the gendarmerie in Galata, Pera, 
and Stamboul had been instructed to look out for a 
European in a gray civilian suit and a black hat. I 
stopped at the nearest outfitting shop, bought a light- 
gray hat, and left the black one lying on a chair. 

Deciding that the water would be safer than the land, 
I made my way back to the bridge, with the intention 
of chartering a small boat for a trip up the Bosphorus. 

Then, crossing the open space facing the bridge, I was 

horrified to see Mahmoud, one of my old guards. He 

f revolved undecidedly and peered among the crowd. 

Obviously he was looking for someone; and the odds were 

a hundred to one that the someone must be me. 

I edged away from him without being observed, and 
dodged into the fruit bazaar among the quayside streets 
to right of the bridge. 

This bazaar was one of the dirtiest in Constantinople. 
Millions of flies drifted over and settled on the baskets 
of tired fruit. The very stalls seemed ready to fall to 
pieces from decrepitude. The people, vendors and 
buyers alike, were dusty and ragged. A few loiterers 
squatted on the cobble stones and sucked orange-peel. 

It was inevitable that in such a place my more or less 
smart Legation suit and my newly bought hat should 
attract attention. A policeman, of the "dog-collar" 
species, seemed particularly interested in them. I was 
leaving the bazaar by a narrow street that looked as if 
it might lead me to the subway station of Galata when 
he barred the way and said something in Turkish, while 
holding out his hand expectantly. 

I failed to understand most of the words, but one of 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 199 

them — vecika — was enough. Vecikas were the Turkish 
passports with which every honest, or rich but dishon- 
est, civilian had to provide himself if he wished to re- 
main at liberty. They might be demanded at any time 
in any place by any gendarme. 

Naturally I could produce no vecika. But I had the 
next best thing. That same morning I had discussed 
with Vladimir Wilkowsky the possibility of being stop- 
ped in the street by a policeman. His advice was that 
if it happened I must claim to be a German officer. I 
remembered being photographed in civilian clothes 
when at Gumuch Souyou Hospital; and before leaving 
Psamatia I gave myself a useful identity by signing one 
of the copies with a German name. 

After searching an inside pocket, I now handed to the 
gendarme a photograph which went to prove that I 
was "Fritz Richter, Oberleutnant in der Fliegertrup- 
pen" Speaking [in fluent German, interspersed with 
a few words of broken Turkish, I protested violently 
that I was a German officer in mufti, and that he would 
get himself into trouble for having presumed to stop a 
German officer. And never was I more frightened 
than when uttering that bombast. 

Half convinced and half browbeaten, the gendarme 
took the photograph, looked at it dubiously, and con- 
sulted a Greek from among the curious crowd that cir- 
cled us. This man, it appeared, claimed to know Ger- 
man. I understood little of the conversation, but as 
far as I could gather the policeman asked if I really were 
a German officer; and the stallkeeper, reading the signa- 
ture laboriously, informed him that it proclaimed me 
to be a Supreme Lieutenant of the Flying Soldiers. 



200 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

" Pek ee, effendi" said the gendarme to me. He re- 
turned the photograph, salaamed, and apologized. He 
then went away. So did I. 

I returned cautiously, through a combination of side 
streets, to the bridge-head, and I was much relieved to 
find that Mahmoud had disappeared. From the quay 
I chartered a rowing-boat, ordering the Turkish haiku 
eke to row me up the Bosphorus. 

"Are you Russian, ejfendim ? " he asked. 

"No, German," I replied, surlily. At that his con- 
versational advances ended. 

The train of thought started by the word Russian 
led me to decide that I had better spend the night 
aboard the Russian tramp steamer on which White 
and I were to travel as stowaways. Vladimir Wilkow- 
sky, in fact, had told me to make for it if I failed to reach 
the hiding-place on shore, and to ask for M. Titoff, the 
chief engineer. Its name, I knew, was the Batoum, 
and most of its officers were in the conspiracy to help 
us, in return for substantial consideration. I knew 
that the ship was moored in the Bosphorus, but of its 
appearance or exact position I had been told nothing. 

"Russky dampfschiff Batoum" I ordered the kaiktche, 
using the polyglot mixture which he was most likely to 
understand. But his voluble jabbering and his expres- 
sive shrug showed that he, also, was ignorant of where 
it lay. 

" Bosphor!" I commanded, pointing higher up the 
Bosphorus and thinking that I would find the name 
Batoum painted on one of the five or six ships that I 
could see in the distance, moored in midstream. 

But having rowed some distance up the Bosphorus 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 201 

and already passed Dolma Bagche Palace, I found no 
ship labelled Batoum. Most of the craft seemed to use 
only numbers as distinguishing marks. What was 
worse, most of them flew the German flag; although 
two of the masts sported a yellow-and-blue standard 
which I failed to recognize. Certainly none flew the 
Russian eagle. 

Our only chance of finding the Batoum was to ask 
directions. We visited several lighters near the quay; 
but the kaiktche's questions to Turks and Greeks were 
unproductive. As a last chance I told him to row close 
to a large steamer, on the deck of which I could see some 
German sailors. 

"Please tell me where I can find the Russian boat 
Batoum," I shouted in German, standing up while the 
kaiktche kept the little craft steady with his oars. 

" Don't know the Batoum/' said a sailor. " Here there 
are no Russian ships now. They've become German or 
Austrian." 

"And those two over there?" I asked, pointing to- 
ward the vessels with the green-and-black ensign. 

"Ukrainian." 

"Thanks very much," I called as we sheered off. My 
mistake, I realized, had been in forgetting for the mo- 
ment the existence of that newly-made-in-Germany 
republic the Ukraine. Any vessel from Odessa not flying 
the German or the Austrian flag would now be Ukrain- 
ian; and the yellow-and-blue standard must be that of 
the Ukrainian Republic. One of the pair flying this 
flag proclaimed itself to be the Nikolaieff. It followed 
that the other, which was marked only by a number, 
must be the Batoum. 



202 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Having made the kaiktche take me to the bottom of 
its gangway, I climbed to the deck. At the top of the 
gangway was a tall man made noticeable by a bristling 
moustache and a well-pressed uniform of white drill. 
Obviously he was a ship's officer, and as such he must 
be one of the syndicate whom Captain White and I 
were bribing. If so, he would know of Wilkowsky. 

" Russky vapor Batoum?" I asked in pidgin-Russian. 

"Da." 

"Monsieur Titoff?" — pointing at him by way of en- 
quiry into his identity. 

' Niet; Monsieur Belaef." 

"Droug Vladimir Ivanovitch Wilkowsky?" 

He gave me a long look, smiled, and said under his 
breath: "Yes, meester." 

These were the only English words known by Ivan 
Stepanovitch Belaef, first mate of the Ukrainian tramp 
steamer Batoum^ from Odessa. And for the moment, 
at any rate, I was safe among friends. 



At about armistice time I was hailed unexpectedly 
in Port Said by C, one of the British officers whom I had 
left behind on the ferry stage of the Golden Horn. He 
himself had seen me leave the cafe, climb the steps 
leading to the bridge, and fade into the crowd. 

A few moments after my disappearance, related C., 
the Turkish officer called the roll of the prisoners, be- 
fore taking them to the ferryboat. That roll-call al- 
most led to the premature discovery of my escape; for 
when the Turk said "A-lan Thom-as Bott," four people 
answered. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE FACE AT THE WINDOW 

"Monsieur Titoff," announced the first mate, entering 
his cabin with a hunched-up figure of a man, whose 
most obvious characteristics were shifty eyes, very 
high cheekbones and a shrivelled, yellow skin. 

M. Titoff and I inspected each other with care as I 
rose from the only chair and shook hands. He, I knew, 
was the guiding spirit in the syndicate of mates and 
engineers whom we were bribing. 

He produced a book of English phrases, with their 
Russian equivalents. Opening it at a prepared page 
be ran his finger down the list and said "Seegnal!" 

"Signal?" 

"Yess, ceegarette seegnal." 

Remembering the arrangements for the beerhouse 
rendezvous, I placed a cigarette behind my left ear; 
whereat the chief engineer and the first mate smiled, 
and shook hands once again. Neither of them could 
speak any language but Russian, so that we talked with 
difficulty, exchanging half-understood patter from the 
phrase book. 

After some strumming on the mandolin and balalaika 
by Titoff and Belaef, I slept on the first mate's couch, 
with my money tucked next to my skin. 

Next morning I was introduced to the third mate, a 

203 



204 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

stocky Lett who could speak German. Using him as 
interpreter Titoff explained his arrangements. I was to 
dress myself as a Russian sailor, leave the Batoum, and 
be led to the hiding-place in Pera. White and I were 
to remain there for a week, until the day before the ship 
sailed. We could then be concealed on board the Batoum 
until she was safely out of the Bosphorus. 

Wearing some old clothes belonging to Kulman, the 
third mate, but with their rank badges removed, I 
rowed ashore. Kulman accompanied me, while Titoff, 
prominent in white drill, waited on the quay. Neither 
he nor the white-bearded old man to whom he was talk- 
ing took the least notice of us, but turned and passed 
toward the Rue de Galata. The third mate and I fol- 
lowed, without, however, showing apparent concern 
in their movements. 

At the corner of a side street on the far side of the 
Rue de Galata Titoff parted from his companion. Kul- 
man followed suit by leaving me, after giving low- 
voiced instructions that I must follow the old man. 

The stranger led the way up the hill, toward Pera, 
while I kept behind him at a convenient distance, on 
the opposite side of the road. For a quarter of an hour 
he moved through a succession of uneven streets and 
cobbled alleys, so that I soon lost my bearings. 

I was not conscious of danger, however. In the faded 
old uniform of a sailor, and with my civilian clothes 
wrapped in a newspaper, I attracted little attention. 
Occasionally I looked into shop windows to divert the 
suspicions of any who might otherwise have noticed 
that I was following the ancient. 

Finally the guide halted among the w6oden houses 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 205 

on the outskirts of Fera, produced an enormous key, 
and unlocked an iron door. I slackened my steps as he 
disappeared inside the door, but passed through it a few 
seconds later. 

Inside was half-darkness. Besides the old man I 
could see, dimly, an unkempt and unshaven figure, 
wearing an overcoat that was much too small for him. I 
looked at this apparition with puzzled doubt. Surely 
it could not be White, whom I had last seen running 
through the streets of Koum-kapou, in a perfectly 
respectable suit of Red Cross clothes ? Yes, it must be, 
for it came toward me with outstretched hand. 

"Glad to see you, old man," said the figure in the 
overcoat. "I don't know which of us looks the more 
comic. " 

"Why the dyed moustache, and why this?" pointing 
to a faded fez which protruded from one of his pockets. 

White reserved his tale until TitofFs friend had left 
us, after promising to return with food and water. 

While the guard was chasing him in Koum-kapou, 
White related, he turned the corner suddenly and saw 
an open doorway. He rushed into it, acting on im- 
pulse. 

Just inside the door was a woman, who screamed. 
He put his hand over her mouth, then dodged down a 
narrow passage into the back room, while the pursuing 
guard raced past the house and up the street. 

Very fortunately for White the woman was a Greek, 
and as such well disposed to the British. She hid him 
in a cupboard for an hour, and persuaded her husband, 
when he arrived home at midday, to provide a disguise. 

White bought a fez and an overcoat, and blackened 



2o6 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

his moustache. The Greek was shorter and slighter 
than he, so that it was impossible to wear the overcoat 
without removing his own jacket and waistcoat. These 
he left in the house. The results, however, justified 
his loss, for when he went into the streets, during the 
afternoon, he was a perfect study of a broken-down 
Levantine. 

He reached Galata too late for the beerhouse rendez- 
vous, and was obliged, therefore, to spend the evening 
and night as best he could. As he wandered along the 
Rue de Galata a policeman stopped him and, according 
to the Near East habit, showed a cigarette without say- 
ing a word and signed that he wanted a light. This 
White supplied from the cigarette he was smoking. 
The gendarme passed on, without deigning to thank 
the wretched looking man in a faded fez and torn coat. 

A cafe and two cinemas filled his evening. After- 
ward, unable to hire a room at any hotel or lodging- 
house, because he had no vecika, he spent the night 
huddled behind a cemetery tombstone. 

Next day he met TitofFs Russian friend in the Ger- 
man beerhouse, according to plan; and so to the hiding- 
place. 

This hiding-place of ours was a disused workshop 
belonging to the Russian, who claimed to be a carpen- 
ter. Its only furniture was a crude bench and a long 
table. The floor lay inches deep in shavings through 
which the rats rustled all night and most of the day. 
There was one small window; but this we were told 
to keep covered by its iron shutter ? in case somebody 
should look in from the street. A tiny yard led from 
the corner opposite the door to the bottom of a shaft, 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 207 

down which the dwellers on the upper floors of the build- 
ing threw their rubbish. 

In themselves these conditions were fairly bad; for 
apart from the lack of furniture, the atmosphere was 
always dusty and unpleasantly musty, and unless we 
opened the window the workshop remained in per- 
petual twilight. But the worst drawback of all was 
that only a flimsy partition separated us from the liv- 
ing room of a Turkish officer. His bedroom was above 
our wooden ceiling. Everything he did we could hear 
quite plainly, whether he coughed, spoke, whistled, re- 
moved his boots, or snored. 

The Turkish officer, we realized, must likewise hear 
every movement of ours; so that whenever either he or 
his orderly or anybody else was in his rooms we main- 
tained, perforce, a death-like stillness. We scarcely 
dared to whisper, or to tip-toe across the workshop on 
bootless feet. In the daytime, the striking of a match 
had to be masked by scraping the shavings, so as to 
make a noise like a rat. After daylight smoking was 
impossible, because the glimmer would have shown 
through the many cracks in the partition. 

We slept side by side on the wooden table, with rolled- 
up coats as pillows. White once woke up in the middle 
of the night and was horrified to hear me talking in my 
sleep. Fortunately, the Turk above was not awake, 
and so missed the performance. Afterward we never 
slept at the same time, but kept watch in turn, in case 
one of us should snore or otherwise attract attention. 
Four of the nights were broken into by machine-gun 
fire from a near-by roof, during British air-raids. 

On my arrival White had told me that we must be 



208 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

particularly careful in the mornings, just after the Turk- 
ish officer left the house. The noises from the living 
room then suggested that somebody, probably the 
Turk's wife, was tidying it. This happened on three 
successive mornings. What worried us in particular 
was a scrunching and scraping behind the partition, 
which suggested that the wife suspected our presence 
and tried to look at us through the cracks. 

Each time this occurred we crouched at the bottom 
of the partition, fingered our lips warningly, and 
scarcely dared to breathe. On the fourth day, when 
the Russian brought our food, we told him our suspi- 
cions. 

"We believe this Turkish officer's wife knows of us," 
said White. "Every morning she comes to the parti- 
tion and seems to be looking through it." 

The carpenter grinned. 

"But," he explained, "the Turk has no wife. What 
you've been frightened of is his tame rabbit!" 

Each day we hoped for news of the Batoum's date of 
sailing. Three times it was postponed; and, bored and 
wretched, we remained perforce in the miserable work- 
shop. 

Unable to keep our minds as inactive as our bodies, 
we took the risk of leaving the window half open during 
the daytime, so that we might study our Russian text- 
books, in readiness for Odessa. Seated on the shavings 
in a position to catch the shaft of light that streamed 
through , the narrow panes, we passed many hours with 
the copying and learning of Russian phrases. 

When, after hours of study, our concentrative facul- 
ties became stale, the only alternative was to hope for 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 209 

success, and to live again in retrospect the extravagant 
happenings of the past few weeks. Most of the busi- 
ness usually associated with the crudest melodrama had 
been there, I reflected — spies, policemen, disguises, 
chases, female accomplices, and bluff. Decidedly it had 
been thrilling; but for the future I desired intensely 
to experience such thrills only at second hand. 

But even in this secluded room we were not to be 
spared the atmosphere of movie-horrifies. Another 
stock thrill was inflicted on us — The Face at the Win- 
dow. 

There had seemed no likelihood of discovery from the 
street. Even if we bared the window from its iron 
shutter, nobody could see into the room without raising 
himself on the ledge, for the lower panes were coated 
with an opaque glaze. At mealtimes, therefore, we let 
in the daylight by withdrawing the shutter. 

One morning, after breakfast, when the Turkish offi- 
cer had left his rooms, I saw White stiffen suddenly as 
we cleared the table. 

"Look natural/' he whispered. "There's no time to 
duck." 

I picked up a plank of wood and tried to appear as 
if my business were carpentry; for over there, four 
yards away, a fez was rising slowly above the glazed 
portion of the window. White performed convincingly 
with a tape-measure, the nearest thing to his hand. 

The fez was the forerunner of a much-wrinkled fore- 
head. Then came a pair of villainous eyes, a bent nose, 
and cheek-bones with light olive skin drawn tightly 
across them. The rest of the face remained hidden by 
the glaze. The Turk — for such he evidently was—- 



210 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

must have levered himself from the ground by means of 
the window-ledge. 

"Don't take any notice of the swine," White mur- 
mured. 

Outwardly calm, but inwardly nervous and shaking, 
I pretended to busy myself with the carpenter's tools, 
although it was difficult to withstand a shocked in- 
stinct to gaze at the Face. It remained for about two 
minutes of heart-throbbing tension, then disappeared, 
and left me gasping with the surprise and the shock of 
its visit. We heard somebody walking away from the 
building and down the hill toward Galata. 

The Face might have belonged to a police spy, we 
speculated, but it might have been that of a casual 
passer-by who was indulging the curiosity in respect of 
other people's business which is common to most Turks. 
In that case no harm would be done, for the stranger 
had seen nothing suspicious — only a workshop, some 
tools and planks, a loaf of bread and a half melon on the 
table, and two coatless, collarless, unshaven, untidy- 
haired men who seemed to be working. 

The carpenter showed fright on being told that a 
Turk had looked in at us, and said he must consult 
Titoff. Before he returned on the following morning 
the Face had again appeared, as before — first a fez ris- 
ing slowly above the glazed pane, then a wrinkled fore- 
head, then the villainous eyes and the crooked nose. It 
remained staring for a few seconds, and disappeared. 

This time the Russian could contain neither his fear 
nor his impatience to get us out of the workshop. If 
we were caught, said he, it would only mean imprison- 
ment for us; but him the Turks might hang as a spy. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 211 

He told us to pack our belongings, while he went to the 
Batoum and arranged with Titoff for us to be taken on 
board. 

An hour later a procession of three passed through 
the winding streets toward the quay. We left the 
workshop in turn, at intervals of a few seconds, for we 
had decided to walk separately, so that if one of us were 
stopped the others could make themselves scarce. 

First went the carpenter, leading the way down the 
hill to Galata. I followed twenty yards behind him, 
still dressed as a Russian sailor; and about twenty 
yards behind me came White, in his fez and old over- 
coat. We scarcely looked at each other, but mooched 
along different sections of the road. Each was ready, 
at a second's warning, to dash down the nearest alley. 

Until the Rue de Galata was reached the only people 
we saw were the dull-eyed and ragged inhabitants of the 
slum quarter that fringes Pera, sitting in their doorways 
and blinking in the heat of early afternoon. But when 
we crossed the Rue de Galata White almost rubbed 
shoulders with a couple of gendarmes. 

TitofF was waiting on the quayside. White and I 
approached him, whereupon the Russian carpenter 
retraced his steps and left us. In my character of a 
Russian seaman I saluted the Batoum' s chief engineer. 
He hustled us into a waiting kaik, and ordered the kaik- 
tche to row to the Batoum. 

Kulman was waiting at the top of the gangway. He 
led us to his cabin, where, he said, we were to live for 
the present. 

Meanwhile, the ship was still empty of cargo, and no 
definite date of sailing had yet been given. This un- 



2i2 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

certain delay was especially unfortunate because, apart 
from the growing risk of discovery, our money was 
diminishing at an alarming rate. 

The door was perforce closed all day long, to prevent 
discovery by the captain. In the heat of those August 
days on the Bosphorus the stifling stuffiness of the un- 
ventilated little cabin became almost unbearable. 

Yet we had one consolation. The port-hole could be 
left open without fear of intrusion by the Face, with its 
wrinkled forehead surmounted by a fez, its villainous 
eyes, its crooked nose, and its olive skin drawn tightly 
across the cheek-bones. . . . 



CHAPTER XIII 

A SHIPLOAD OF ROGUES 

Michael Ivanovitch Titoff, one-time chief engineer 
of the tramp steamer Batoum, proved to the dissatisfac- 
tion of Captain White and myself that he was a thief, 
a mean blackguard, a cunning liar, a cringing coward, 
a rat, and an altogether despicable cheat. Otherwise he 
was not a bad sort of fellow. 

. At the time when we lived on board the Batoum as 
stowaways her officers and crew were rogues almost to 
a man. Except Titoff and one or two of the crew they 
were likeable rogues, however, and applied an in- 
stinctive sense of decency to their unlawful dealings. 
For example, Andreas Kulman, the Lettish third mate, 
would cheerfully cheat the Turkish merchant who had 
chartered the vessel, and cheerfully smuggle drugs 
from anywhere to anywhere; but I never knew him 
cheat a friend or a poor man, or take advantage of a 
stranger in difficulties. To us, as prisoners escaping 
from Turkey, he showed many kindnesses; and if we 
had been without money he would have been willing to 
take us across the Black Sea without payment. The 
other mates were of the same type, if a trifle less oblig- 
ing. 

The second and third engineers — Feodor Mozny and 
Josef Koratkov — were among the few of our shipmates 

213 



2i 4 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

who could not be classified as rogues. They trans- 
gressed only to the innocuous extent of smuggling 
moneyed stowaways and contraband goods. They, also, 
showed White and myself many kindnesses; as did the 
second engineer's wife, who voyaged with her husband. 
Several evenings she spent in the heat of the frowsy 
little engine room, washing our only underclothes, 
while we sat in JosePs cabin, clad in nothing but the 
tunic and trousers of our Russian-sailor disguises. 

We wore these disguises for the benefit of visitors to 
the Batoum, and not to throw dust in the eyes of the 
crew. That was needless, for, except the captain, every 
man belonging to the ship soon knew of us. The mar- 
vel was that with so many people privy to the secret it 
never leaked to the Turkish police. In pro-Entente 
circles ashore our presence on the Batoum was widely 
known and widely discussed; and I count it a debt to 
Providence that the news was not carried to the Minis- 
try of War by one of the city's many police spies. The 
crew were unlikely to betray us knowingly, for every 
man of them must have been concerned in something 
which might wither in the strong light of a police in- 
vestigation. Besides, they were tolerant of the Brit- 
ish, while disliking the Turks even more than they dis- 
liked the Germans. 

The captain — a white-bearded, bent-backed Greek 
of about eighty — seemed incompetent, and well on the 
way to senile decay, but withal harmless. This voyage 
was to be his last before enforced retirement. He was 
as wax in the cunning hands of TitofF, who kept from 
him the knowledge that two escaped Britishers were 
aboard. Had he known he would have either in- 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 215 

sisted on our removal, or — more probably — demanded 
a large share of the passage money. It was easy to keep 
the ancient in ignorance, for apparently he knew less 
than anybody else of what happened on his vessel. 
Titoff assured us that should the captain see us in our 
disguise of Russian sailors he would remain unsuspi- 
cious if we took care not to speak. His declining mind 
had become too feeble to remember off-hand even the 
number of the crew; and much less could he remember 
their faces. Once I brushed by him closely, outside 
Kulman's cabin. He passed without a glance at me, 
looking on the ground and muttering into his beard. 

The crew was a dubious mixture. Many — in par- 
ticular the firemen — had been Bolsheviki until Aus- 
tro-German forces landed at Odessa and Sevastopol 
and temporarily crushed Bolshevism in South Russia. 
Other ex-members of the bourgeoisie, but unable to make 
a living on land under present conditions, had become 
temporary seamen by the grace of friends connected 
with the shipping company that owned the Batoum. 
There was also a bright youth named Viktor, who, until 
the Bolshevist revolution, was a student. His father, a 
lawyer, had been killed in the rioting at Kieff that ac- 
companied the Soviet rise to power; and the son, to keep 
himself alive, now swabbed the decks of a tramp steamer 
and submitted to being kicked by sailors and corrupted 
by Michael Ivanovitch Titoff. Viktor spoke French 
and German, and was therefore muchjn request as in- 
terpreter when the ship's officers bargained with their 
stowaways or invested in contraband consignments, or 
when one of them brought on board some cosmopolitan 
wench from Pera or Galata. 



216 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Our most interesting shipmate on the Batoum was 
perhaps Bolshevik Bill the Greaser. One afternoon 
when White, dressed in sailor's clothes, was helping to 
paint the ship's side, a hard-faced giant in overalls ap- 
proached him, produced a Russian-French grammar, 
and asked for a lesson. So far as his slight knowledge 
of French and slighter knowledge of Russian allowed, 
White did his best to comply. Thereafter the greaser 
became a close friend, following us round the deck in 
the evening, visiting us at odd hours during the day- 
time, and bringing us figs. 

Like most of the greasers and firemen he was a Bol- 
shevik. He was not a bloodthirsty Bolshevik, how- 
ever, but one who, according to his own limited and 
crude conceptions of universal equality, wanted plenty 
of wealth, plenty of happiness, plenty of vodka for all. 
He was especially eloquent and brotherly when drunk. 

Others of the Bolsheviki were idealists of a more 
exterminative type. Once, when White was playing 
cards with some firemen in the engine room, the talk 
swung to the Russian Revolution. A lean man, who 
until then had been too busy drinking to speak, began 
to describe the mutiny in the Baltic Fleet, of which he 
had been a sailor. In his intensity he seemed to live 
again through the horrors of it, as with gloating gesture 
he described how unpopular officers had been thrown 
into the sea with weights tied to their feet. 

"That was bad, very bad," protested White in his 
halting Russian. "If you are in power and somebody 
has done wrong, he should be given a fair trial and, if 
convicted, put in prison. But to kill men merely be- 
cause you dislike them isvery wrong." 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 217 

"Well said!" commented Bolshevik Bill the Greaser. 

"No; well meant if you like/' amended the lean fire- 
man, as he patted White on the back; "but the Meester 
does not understand us. We would never do such a 
thing to English officers. We had them as instructors 
and found them true friends of their men. Our officers 
were very different. They hit us and ignored us and 
treated us like animals. We shall never be perma- 
nently free until they are all dead. We must destroy 
their class. Russia — — " 

His voice had been growing louder and more rau- 
cous. Suddenly it softened as he turned to White and 
said : "Meester, you know your business and we know 
ours. Have a fig." And the game of cards continued. 

Yet, among the whole shipload of rogues, the only 
man who victimized us was Titoff, the chief engineer. 
When we first came aboard he demanded twelve dollars 
a day for food which, being stolen from the ship's sup- 
plies, cost him nothing. At the instigation of the 
second and third engineers we reduced the payment to 
six dollars a day. He blustered, but gave way and 
tried to make up the difference by cheating us over 
tobacco, cigarettes, newspapers, and other articles 
bought on shore. He paid twenty-five dollars for a 
revolver, and tried to sell it to us for thirty-five, as being 
the cost price. 

We had left at Psamatia a store of clothes and tinned 
food, which was to have been smuggled on board by the 
Russian aviator Vladimir Wilkowsky. As the days 
passed and nothing arrived we suspected Wilkowsky of 
having either failed or fooled us. Then, at a party in 
TitofFs cabin one evening, I saw inside a cupboard some 



2i 8 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

tins of biscuits and cocoa, of the kinds that were sent to 
aviator prisoners in Turkey by the British Flying Ser- 
vices Fund. Tit off could not — and in any case cer- 
tainly would not — have bought them in Constantinople; 
for English cocoa and biscuits, if obtainable at all in the 
shops of Pera, fetched extortionate prices. 

Although the mere sight of the tins provided insuf- 
ficient proof, the inference was that Wilkowsky had 
sent our belongings and that Titoff had stolen them. 
But we delayed investigation and accusation until we 
should be safely out of Turkey, and in the possession 
of revolvers. Some time or other we meant to make 
Titoff suffer. Meanwhile, we were forced to wait until 
our moment came. 

Dela}^ followed upon heart-breaking delay, until we 
began to lose hope that the Batoum would ever weigh 
anchor. In four days' time, it was promised, the cargo 
would arrive. Two days later the four days had 
stretched, elastic-wise, to ten, because a consignment of 
figs had not arrived from Smyrna. Then, a week after- 
ward, a further extension of five days was reported, 
the Turkish merchant having failed to come to terms 
with the Ministry of Commerce. 

It became impossible for us to remain in Kulman's 
cabin, which faced the captain's. The old skipper re- 
ceived many visitors, including Turkish officials, any 
one of whom might have been led by mischance to dis- 
cover us. At Tit off 's suggestion we moved to a small 
room on the bridge, formerly occupied by a wireless 
operator, in the days when the Batoum was a Russian 
transport. The transmitter and receiver were still 
there, but had been out of action long since, for the Ger- 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 219 

mans forbade the use of wireless by merchant craft in 
the Black Sea. 

There we remained hidden for a succession of twelve 
monotonous days and nights enlivened only by British 
air-raids and by expeditions to the deck when sunset 
and twilight were past, and we could take exercise by 
tramping backward and forward, forward and back- 
ward, in the shadow. For the rest, we continued to 
study Russian, and received friendly calls from Kul- 
man, Josef, Feodor, Viktor the Student, and Bolshevik 
Bill the Greaser. 

TitofF visited us once only, when he searched for the 
platinum points on the Marconi transmitter. But al- 
ready every morsel of platinum had been removed; and 
the chief engineer seemed disgusted that somebody else 
should have anticipated his latest idea for profitable 
villainy. 

The tedium of inactive waiting, of day-to-day hopes 
and disappointments, was as unpleasant and irritating 
as a blanket of damp horsehair. Our only diversion 
was the kaleidoscopic view from the window, while the 
ship swung with the tides. Not fifty yards away the 
Sultan's summer palace stood in whitestone promi- 
nence amid the dull, squat buildings of Galata. Look- 
ing across the Bosphorus, with its heavy dhows, its 
ferryboats, its dancing kaiks, and its sun-glittering 
wavelets, we could see Seraglio Point, and, in the dis- 
tance, the domed roofs and minaret spires of St. Sophia 
and the other great mosques of Stamboul. 

Meals were served irregularly, for journeys from the 
kitchen to the wireless cabin were dependent upon the 
outgoings and incomings of the captain and his visitors. 



220 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND , FLIGHTS 

Whenever he or they came on the bridge we made fast 
the door, and crouched beneath the window. 

Our supply of money continued to dwindle, until it 
was insufficient to pay the four hundred Turkish pounds 
which TitofF demanded as passage money. We hesi- 
tated to approach Mr. S. once more, not wishing to 
involve him in our danger. Yet we had no other method 
of obtaining funds. Driven to the distasteful course 
by urgent necessity we decided to compromise by com- 
municating with him through intermediaries, instead 
of visiting his office ourselves. 

TitofF was anxious to be employed as messenger, but 
we shrank from placing him in a position which he 
might misuse to blackmail Mr. S. We therefore re- 
sumed communication with Theodore, the Greek wait- 
er, by sending him an envelope that contained instruc- 
tions for himself, and a sealed letter for Mr. S. When 
TitofF went ashore to deliver the envelope to Theodore, 
Kulman accompanied him, as a check on his propensity 
to walk crookedly. 

The pair returned with the welcome news that Mr. 
S. would cash our cheques in three days' time. Mean- 
while, the stowaway syndicate had been offered new 
business. Fulton and Stone had appeared once again 
upon the escape-horizon, and were living in Theodore's 
house. Yeats-Brown, in his disguise, was paying them 
frequent visits. Theodore had approached TitofF with 
a proposition that on the night before the Batoum 
sailed the three of them should join us. The chief 
engineer and his partners rather shied at the increased 
risk, but the money offered was too much for them, and 
they agreed to take Yeats-Brown, Fulton, and Stone. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 221 

And then, with the prospect before us of sufficient 
funds and three useful companions, we suffered yet 
another disappointment. At the time appointed for a 
rendezvous Titoff went to fetch the money which Mr. S. 
was to send by Theodore. He returned with an anxious 
face and the announcement that the Greek waiter had 
disappeared. He waited vainly for more than an hour 
in the Maritza restaurant, where the other waiters pro- 
fessed to know nothing of Theodore's whereabouts. 

It now seemed that not only should we be unable to 
pay for our passage, but that we had lost the money 
paid by Mr. S. (so we surmised) in exchange for our 
cheques. Somewhere, we felt sure, there was roguery. 
Three likely and unpleasant possibilities loomed before 
us. Theodore might have stolen the money and then 
vanished; Titoff might have stolen it; they might have 
stolen it jointly. Our one legitimate hope was that 
Mr. S. might not have cashed the cheques before Theo- 
dore's disappearance. 

Our only chance of discovering the truth was per- 
sonal investigation. On the following afternoon White, 
again wearing his fez and old overcoat and with his 
moustache darkened, rowed ashore. He took the tram 
to the foot of the Golden Horn bridge, walked across to 
Stamboul, and entered the Maritza. 

The low-roofed restaurant's appearance was as us- 
ual; but somehow the atmosphere seemed electric with 
suspicion. A Turkish officer of gendarmerie sat at a 
table near the door. Theodore was conspicuously ab- 
sent. 

White ordered a glass of beer, and while doing so 
asked for news of him. The waiter looked frightened, 



222 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

and left the table without a reply. When he returned 
White repeated the question. He was then told : 

"He has fallen with the three British officers. I pray 
you not to talk of it." 

"But I must know," urged White, speaking in low- 
toned, halting French. "I am a British officer my- 
self" — for this waiter, also, had acted as an intermediary 
for prisoners. He now looked more frightened than 
ever, and took care to keep away from the neighbour- 
hood of White's table. 

Glancing round, White saw a Turk washing his hands 
in the little basin at the back of the room, while looking, 
slantwise but intently, at each man present in turn, 
but more particularly at the proprietor and the waiters. 

After White's return to the Batoum with the bad 
news we all but gave up hope of recovering the four 
hundred Turkish pounds, for the police would most 
certainly have taken whatever moneys were found on 
Theodore. We had, also, to reckon with the new dan- 
ger that bastinado floggings might persuade the Greek 
into betraying us. 

Next morning's issue of the Lloyd Ottoman brought 
detailed confirmations. Three British officers, said 
a Faits Divers paragraph, had been concealed in the 
house of one Theodore Yanni, a Greek waiter employed 
at a restaurant in Stamboul. The police surrounded 
the building and discovered them. They were taken to 
the Ministry of War Prison with Theodore, his two 
sisters, and his aged mother. 

The Ministry of War Prison — "The Black Hole of 
Constantinople"! We could see the Ministry of War 
in the distance from the bridge of the Batoum, and 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 223 

knowing the horrors of its special punishment cells, we 
shuddered with sympathy for the strangely mixed 
party. Theodore himself, we supposed, would be hanged 
out of hand. 

Our almost hopeless position forced us into the reck- 
less decision to discover the truth by paying a personal 
visit to Mr. S. His office was in the Prisoners of War 
department of the Dutch Legation, where he helped to 
administer the British Red Cross funds. 

The building was on the way to the Petits Champs 
Gardens, near the Pera Palace Hotel; and there I went, 
in my sailor's uniform, with Kulman as companion. At 
the door was a multi-lingual porter, whom I had seen 
when, before my escape, I once bribed a guard into 
letting me visit the Prisoners' Bureau. I hung back, 
and allowed Kulman to take the lead; for I feared that, 
despite the Russian uniform, the porter might recognize 
me by certain scars on my face, the legacy of an aero- 
plane crash. Fortunately he could talk Russian. In 
answer to Kulman he said that Mr. S. was out for the 
rest of the day. We left, therefore, and passed the af- 
ternoon in various cafes, where Kulman introduced me 
to friends as a German-speaking Lett. 

Next afternoon, before starting for Pera, I was care- 
ful to make the tell-tale scars less evident by means of 
chalk and powder. This time we found that Mr. S. 
was in the Dutch Legation annexe, although engaged 
and busy. We walked up the stairway to the first 
floor and stood in the corridor outside Mr. S.'s office. 

Only then did I realize the foolhardiness of the visit. 
Very much in evidence were two officials whom I had 
met as a prisoner; and I was forced to shrink behind 



224 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Kulman when there passed a Jewish kavass who knew 
me well, from having brought clothes and money when 
I was a hospital patient. Fortunately he went by with 
only a casual glance at the two men in sailors' uniform. 

We waited twenty minutes, and still the man with 
whom Mr. S. was closeted remained in the office. Twice, 
speaking in French, I made application to the lady- 
secretary of Mr. S.; but already, before we arrived, three 
people had been waiting to see him, and I was told that 
we must wait our turn. Kulman became anxious and 
fidgety, especially when, looking down the stairs, he 
saw some Turks in the hall. 

Standing near us in the corridor were two elderly 
Jews, who appeared to listen intently when Kulman 
thought fit to emphasize my uniform by addressing me 
in Russian. Presently one of them produced an un- 
lighted cigarette, and, also speaking in Russian, asked 
me for a match. -Without a word I complied, while 
Kulman, by himself beginning a conversation, forestalled 
the suspicions which would have arisen if the Jew had 
begun to question me. I avoided speaking to them by 
again visiting the lady secretary. Later, Kulman drew 
me aside and said that it was impossible to remain any 
longer with the two Russian-speaking Jews. 

His nerves — and mine also, for that matter — be-, 
came still more shaky when, as we passed through the 
hall doorway, the porter stared hard at me and then 
followed us with his eyes until we turned into a side 
street that took us out of sight. 

Although I had failed for the moment to reach Mr. S., 
it was imperative that one of us should see him. A new 
method of approach was advisable, for I believed that 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 225 

the porter half thought he recognized me. If I re- 
turned he would be more than ever suspicious of the 
scars; for everybody in the Prisoners of War Bureau 
had heard of my escape. The only alternative was for 
White to go. His disguise as Turk would be useless, 
as most people at the Legation spoke Turkish well, 
whereas he spoke it indifferently, with an accent that 
reeked of English vowel-sounds. We canvassed vari- 
ous nationalities and roles, and agreed that he must 
accuse himself of being one of the American mis- 
sionaries who were still at liberty in Turkey. 

Wearing my suit of mufti and the felt hat which I 
bought on the day I escaped, White shook hands and 
left me, after a reminder that if he were captured my 
clothes would go to prison with him. He was far from 
cheerful, for it was Friday, the thirteenth of September; 
and he remembered that his capture in Mesopotamia 
had taken place on Friday, the thirteenth of Septem- 
ber, 191 5. 

Anxiously and uncomfortably, I waited through 
several hours of strained inactivity, fearing that if 
White, also, were recognized at the Prisoners' Bureau, 
disaster might overtake not only him, but our bene- 
factor Mr. S. 

At six o'clock he burst into the wireless cabin with a 
beaming face and the joyous announcement: 

" I've seen S., and the money's not lost." 

White's Friday, the thirteenth of September, had 
been an exciting one. He walked into the doorway of 
the Prisoners of War Bureau, and speaking in English, 
asked for Mr. S. 

"Name?" inquired the porter. 



226 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

"Mr. Henry O'Neill, from Tarsus." 

" Do you know Mr. S.?" 

"Why, certainly, I'm a friend of his." And White 
felt in his waistcoat pocket, as if searching for a card. 

"His office is on the first floor," said the porter, 
satisfied. "Go straight up." 

With a gulp of relief White passed up the stairway. 
Like myself on the day before, he had to wait many 
minutes before Mr. S. was disengaged; and like myself 
he was horrified to see Levy, the Jew kavass who had 
brought his letters and parcels to Gumuch Souyou 
Hospital. The kavass beamed, and delivered himself 
of an oily greeting, but failed to remember where he 
had met White. 

"You speak as an Englishman," he said, after a few 
words of conversation. "You are a English prisoner, 
not?" 

"Of course Fm an English prisoner," admitted 
White, slapping Levy on the back. "My guard's wait- 
ing outside." 

The kavass fetched a chair for White and seemed dis- 
posed to ask more troublesome questions. Just then 
the visitor who had been engaged with Mr. S. left the 
office, and White walked inside, praying that the kavass 
and the porter would not compare notes, and identify 
Mr. Henry O'Neill, of Tarsus, with the British pris- 
oner whose guard was waiting in the street. 

The door being closed White explained his real 
identity to Mr. S., and offered apologies for the danger- 
ous visit to which he had been forced by our desperate 
situation. 

"You needn't worry about the money," said Mr. S,, 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 227 

"I had no chance of paying it. IVe destroyed the 
cheques." 

He went on to relate how, not wishing to trust the 
Greek waiter with; a large sum, he had sent a clerk 
to pay the banknotes into the hands of Titoff, at the 
Maritza. The clerk visited the little restaurant on the 
afternoon when Titoff waited in vain for Theodore. He 
dared not deliver the money there and then, for a Turk 
appeared to be watching the Russian engineer. When 
Titoff tired of waiting and went into the street the Turk 
followed, and shadowed him. The clerk, in his turn, 
trailed the Turkish agent unobtrusively. The three 
of them travelled in the same subway car from Galata 
to Pera. Titoff passed into Taxim Gardens. So did 
the agent and the clerk. He sat down and ordered a 
drink near the bandstand. The agent chose a table 
near him, and the clerk stationed himself within sight 
of both. At last, giving up hope of an opportunity to 
speak with Titoff, the clerk returned to Mr. S. and gave 
back the money. 

Mr. S., meanwhile, had heard of the capture of Yeats- 
Brown, Fulton, and Stone, all of whom he had helped. 
He realized that he himself was in grave danger. 

"I've had some sleepless nights over you fellows/' 
he said to White. "I rather think IVe been watched 
since the others were taken with Theodore, and I know 
your friend TitofFs watched. If Theodore blabs in 
prison, my neck will be almost as near the noose as his." 

Mr. S., very rightly, was unwilling to advance us 
money for the present. 

"The police want you badly," he pointed out, "and 
I'm probably a suspect already over Yeats-Brown and 



228 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Company. If you're grabbed in Constantinople I 
want to be able to say with a clear conscience that I've 
given you no cash since you escaped. I shall know 
when the Batoum is due to leave, and do my best to 
help you on the day before she sails, when you're all but 
out of the wood. The difficulty will be in finding a 
messenger. An English lady* helped the fellows who 
were retaken, and she'd like to take you the money. 
But she's involved over them and the police are watch- 
ing her." 

Deeply appreciative of the great risks which Mr. S. 
was taking on behalf of not only us, but every prisoner 
who had tried to escape from Constantinople, White 
thanked him and left. At the top of the stairs he said 
good-bye to the kavass who knew him as a prisoner; at 
the front door he nodded to the porter who knew him 
as Mr. Henry O'Neill, of Tarsus. And so back to his 
role of paying guest on the Batoum. 

With eased minds and renewed hope we continued 
to live in our wireless cabin, and prayed to Allah that 
the Batoum would sail soon, and that Mr. S. would find 
some means of sending the money. Away in the dis- 
tance we could see the citadel of the Turkish Ministry 
of War, in which Yeats-Brown, Fulton, and Stone were 
dungeoned. All Constantinople talked of the capture, 
and the word went round the cafes that Theodore was 
to be hanged as a traitor, for having helped enemy pris- 
oners to escape. 

Thereupon Titoff, mortally afraid for his own neck, 
wanted to get rid of White and me. He made our short- 
age of ready money an excuse for ordering us ashore; 

*Miss Whittaker. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 229 

but we claimed to have grown too fond of him to part 
company, and said that if we did leave the ship it would 
be to give ourselves up to the police, with the request 
that our friend and colleague Michael Ivanovitch TitofF 
should join us to prison. Michael Ivanovitch then 
protested, out of the kindness of his heart, that he would 
take us to Odessa whether we paid the full amount or 
only part of it. 

So the anxious hours passed, until at last the sicken- 
ing period of delay ended with the arrival of a consign- 
ment of cargo. A succession of lighters left the quay 
and moored alongside us, and all day we listened with 
delight to the clatter and whirr of the winches as they 
transferred bales and barrels to the Batoums hatches. 
The final and infallible date of departure, announced 
the Turkish merchant who had chartered the ship for 
her voyage to Odessa, was September the twenty- 
second — four days later. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE CITY OF DISGUISES 

Constantinople, even at its most normal, has ever 
been a city of concealment — concealed motives, con- 
cealed truths and falsehoods, concealed cruelties and 
concealed persons. There, the way to a treaty, a change 
of government, a concession or a commercial contract 
is often through back doors and curtained corridors, 
with many a halt for whispered promises, whispered 
betrayals, and the handing over of baksheesh. 

When normal life is upset by abnormal conditions the 
cauldron of crookedness bubbles over with a thousand 
and one conspiracies. Every other man is intriguing 
for himself, his safety, his pocket, his party, his family, 
or his government appointment, or from sheer in- 
ability not to intrigue. Such a period was the late 
summer of 191 8, when we were disguised spectators of 
the misery and oppression that preceded the downfall 
of the Turkish Empire. 

Four-fifths of the population, including the Turks 
themselves, were deadly sick of war and wanted peace 
at any price. They hated the Germans, and above all 
hated Enver Pasha and other Young Turk dictators, 
who ruled by violence with the support of the Germans. 
Only the politicians, the officials who lived by corrup- 
tion, and the speculators were against a separate peace. 

230 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 231 

Many a time, before I escaped, I heard curses on 
Enver and on the Germans uttered by civilians, by offi- 
cers, and even by guards. Once, when a party of us 
were sitting in Petits Champs Gardens, a waiter brought 
with the bill for tea a slip of paper on which he had writ- 
ten "Vive TAngleterre!" Later, dressed as a sailor 
and sitting in the cafes with Kulman, I often heard the 
same sentiments expressed. 

Yet the miserable, exploited populace seemed power- 
less to impress its wishes on the Government. It was 
too disunited and too listless for action. A total lack 
of national consciousness made Constantinople a cap- 
ital without a country. The population was a hap- 
hazard jumble of races, an olla podrida of peoples that 
nothing, not even hunger and tyranny, could mould 
into a coherent whole. They murmured individually, 
but collectively they remained resigned and silent. 

If circulation be the test of a city's vitality it proved 
Constantinople to be at very low ebb. All Mediter- 
ranean peoples move slowly in the streets; but the Con- 
stantinopolitans of 191 8, I noticed, seemed to get no- 
where; they crawled about aimlessly, or leaned against 
the walls and doorways in fatalistic inaction, waiting 
for something to happen. 

In any case, the least attempt at organized protest 
was likely to lead to sudden disappearances. The dun- 
geons of Stamboul jail were crammed with Greek, Ar- 
menian, and Turkish suspects; the infamous "Hall of 
Justice," in the Ministry of War, echoed the cries of 
prisoners whose interrogators extracted "information" 
by means of the bastinado. Open malcontents were 
hanged daily. 



232 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Every decent-living person was likely to feel the ten- 
tacles of Young Turk tyranny, as personified by Bedri 
Bey, Prefect of Police, and Djevad Bey, Military Gov- 
ernor of Constantinople. Only the unrighteous flour- 
ished. The speculation and graft were colossal, and 
beyond the most extravagant dreams of the British 
brand of war profiteer. Everybody was on the make. 
Ministers and high officials received huge bribes, little 
politicians made little fortunes by acting as go-be- 
tweens, rich merchants manipulated so as to get hun- 
dreds per cent, profit. 

To take but a few of the swindles that I remember 
from my Constantinople days, there were: the Smyrna 
sugar affaire, involving the barefaced theft of twenty 
truckloads of a consignment from Austria; the tobacco 
swindle, which made three directors of the Regie very 
wealthy men within a month; the cocaine and quinine 
corner, engineered by a few Jewish speculators, so that 
for a time the doctors could obtain these drugs only at 
the price of a hundred pounds a kilo; the oil scandal, 
the wood scandal, and the widespread flour-adultera- 
tion scandal, whereby the lowest grade of bread, which 
was all that the poor could afford, became not only 
unnourishing but inedible. 

There being no system of rationing, only the well-to- 
do could buy the dearer necessities of ordinary life. 
The poor remained sugarless, for example, because sugar 
cost from two pounds sterling a kilo; and the chances 
were that even when bought at that price it would 
have been mixed with powdered marble. Thou- 
sands actually starved; while the beautiful island of 
Prinkipo, with its summer palaces and villas, swarmed 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 233 

with oily, scoundrelly, enormously wealthy Levantine 
vulgarians. 

Some of the Ministers traded openly. Enver Pasha 
and his associates owned two of the largest shops in 
Stamboul. The Committee of Union and Progress, 
a vampire of corruption that drained the very life blood 
of Turkey, engaged enthusiastically in the orgy of 
speculation, and, by controlling the transport, amassed 
millions for their party. These sums the Committee 
had begun to invest in Switzerland and elsewhere as 
early as 191 7; so that when the crash came Enver, 
Talaat, and other Young Turk leaders were able to 
abscond with bulging pockets. 

The police, of course, shared in the plunder, and dab- 
bled in every species of blackmail. They waxed fat 
on the system that entitled them to see the vecikas 
(identity papers) of any able-bodied man at any time. 
As the city contained many thousands of deserters, 
without taking into account those who obtained exemp- 
tion from military service by continued bribes to re- 
cruiting officers and gendarmes, this was a profitable 
responsibility. A forged vecika, properly stamped, cost 
anything from fifty to a hundred dollars. To buy off a 
policeman when unprovided with a vecika was more 
speculative. A solitary gendarme, alone in a dark 
street, might be content to accept twenty-five dollars; 
whereas two gendarmes together could be persuaded 
only with difficulty to accept twenty, their mutual 
dignity and that of their official positions having to be 
maintained in face of each other. 

The city was full of suppressed identities. Deserters 
were as common as nuts in May, and so were disguises. 



234 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

An enormous game of hide-and-seek was in progress, 
with police baksheesh as the forfeit for being caught. 

When a rich man — Turk, Greek, Jew, or Armenian — 
was conscripted he could always pretend sickness, bribe 
the military doctor to send him to a hospital, bribe the 
hospital doctor who examined him, and finally bribe 
the medical board to give him leave. At the larger 
hospitals of Constantinople, such as Haidar Pasha and 
Gumuch Souyou, the recognized tarifF was a hundred 
and twenty-five dollars for each month's leave, with 
pretended complaints suggested by the doctor by way 
of bonus. 

The discontent and the misery twice showed itself 
in shots at Enver Pasha, as he drove through the streets 
in his Mercedes; but the bullets either missed him or 
flattened themselves on the chain mail which he was 
reputed to wear. 

Otherwise its outward manifestation was confined 
to the spreading of rumours indicative of an early vic- 
tory for the Allies. The "Tatavla Agency," so-named 
from a district inhabitated by Greek merchants, was 
the centre of anti-German propaganda. From it, 
even at the time of Hindenburg's last great drive, there 
spread the wildest reports of Ententist successes. Some, 
no doubt, were concocted to influence the Bourse; but 
the object of most was to encourage the starving popula- 
tion in their hopes for the downfall of the Young Turco- 
German regime. 

No statement was too far-fetched to be believed in 
the bazaars and cafes. When the British aeroplanes 
renewed their bomb-raids on Constantinople, in the 
autumn of 1918, Yeats-Brown dropped hints that the 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 235 

attacks were not the work of the British, but were a 
display of German frightfulness, to show what would 
happen if Turkey's loyalty to Germany wavered. After 
an interval of weeks this beautiful lie was whispered 
back to him by a Greek, with well-imagined circum- 
stances and details to make it the more plausible. 

Captain Yeats-Brown and Captain Sir Robert Paul 
lived through the most extravagant adventures before 
the Turkish armistice found them still in disguised 
liberty. They first escaped with the help of Miss 
Whittaker, "the Edith Cavell of Constantinople." It 
was owing to her that, already before leaving the prison 
at Psamatia, they were well supplied with money and 
could look forward to a hiding-place. As prisoners, 
they had kept in touch with her by means of letters, 
five-minute meetings outside the British Church, and 
short conversations in the park, under the complacent 
eyes of a bribed guard. 

One night they slipped through the window of their 
room in the prison-house, and having climbed along a 
narrow ledge, let themselves into the street with a rope. 
Wearing fezzes and with their faces stained brown, 
they walked to Theodore's house. Afterward they 
moved to the room prepared for them in Pera. 

A few days later Paul, dressed as an Arab, left Con- 
stantinople with two Greeks. The party of three 
crossed the Sea of Marmora in a sailing-boat, landed 
on the northern coast, and began tramping toward the 
Gulf of Enos, where a boat awaited them. 

Unfortunately for Paul the description of him, which 
the Ministry of War circulated, mentioned that he had 
a prominent stoop. A stranger with this peculiarity 



236 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

was found asleep in the church of a Greek village; and 
by arresting him the local gendarme earned (but prob- 
ably never received) the reward offered for the British 
officer's capture. Paul was brought back to the capital 
and dungeoned in the Ministry of War Prison. 

Yeats-Brown, meanwhile, had been stalking about 
the streets of Constantinople as Mile. Josephine Albert, 
in female clothes lent by Miss Whittaker. He was now 
at a loose end, for Paul and the Greeks were to have 
been the advance guard of a larger party, including 
Yeats-Brown and several civilians who wished to leave 
Turkey. 

After weeks of excitement in the City of Disguises 
Mile. Albert received an unexpected message from 
two old friends, who were living in a back room of Theo- 
dore's house. Fulton and Stone had escaped from a 
train at Haidar Pasha station two hours after my dis- 
appearance from the ferry stage. With the help of my 
map they made their way by moonlight to San Stefano 
aerodrome. There they waited for three days at the 
place of rendezvous appointed by John Willie, the 
Bosnian aviator. Made desperate by his nonappear- 
ance one of them called at the German officers' mess and 
enquired for him; but, as they then learned, John Willie 
had been arrested a week earlier as a suspect, and was in 
the Ministry of War Prison, awaiting court-martial. 

Fulton and Stone returned to Constantinople, and 
bribed Theodore to hide them in his house. They were 
visited by Miss Whittaker, who brought money from 
Mr. S., and by Mile. Josephine Albert Yeats-Brown. 

For want of a better opportunity the three British 
officers planned to buy a small sailing-boat, and take it 




Captain Yeates-Brown, wearing the disguise in which as "Mile. Jose- 
phine Albert" he lived for several weeks in Constantinople while doing 
propaganda work. The clothes were lent to him by Miss Whittaker 
(now Lady Paul), "the Edith Cavell of Constantinople," who helped 
several British officers to escape from the Turks. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 237 

across the Black Sea. Prince Avaloff, the Georgian 
officer who was a semi-prisoner at Psamatia, had kept 
in touch with Yeats-Brown, and promised to accompany 
them. Having landed somewhere near Poti their 
scheme would be to make for AvalofFs estate in Georgia. 
It was at this period that White and I heard from the 
trio, as a result of TitofFs visit to Theodore. 

For many weeks the Maritza restaurant had been 
watched. A police spy suspected Theodore; and one 
afternoon gendarmes surrounded his house, while others 
entered and searched every room. Very unfortunately 
for Yeats-Brown, whose hiding-place lay elsewhere, he 
was visiting Fulton and Stone at the time. All three 
were captured. 

A queer procession passed through the winding alleys 
of Stamboul to the Ministry of War Prison. First 
went Theodore, blinking nervously behind his blue- 
glassed spectacles. Then came Yeats-Brown, in his 
brand-new disguise of a Hungarian mechanic. Fulton 
and Stone were behind him, wearing only shirts, pants, 
and socks; for they had been half dressed when captured, 
and the police refused permission to put on coats and 
trousers. Theodore's two sisters and his old mother 
brought up the rear. 

When the police surrounded Theodore's house Miss 
Whittaker was on her way to visit Fulton and _Stone. 
Seeing gendarmes before the door she passed on, and 
returned to her home in Pera; but for long afterward 
she was conscious of being spied upon and followed. It 
was for this reason that she had to abandon her inten- 
tion of bringing to the Batoum the money which White 
and I were to receive from Mr. S. 



238 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

The prison beneath the Ministry of War now con- 
tained an extraordinary gathering of characters in the 
melodrama of escape and capture. Paul was joined 
by Yeats-Brown, Fulton, and Stone; John Willie, the 
Bosnian, was in another cell, with some political pris- 
oners; Theodore, weakened by lack of food, fell ill in a 
dreadful dungeon, and nearly died. A trial, he knew, 
could only have one result for him — sentence of hang- 
ing. His mother and his two sisters received rather 
better treatment, and were soon released. 

The four Britishers lived through many strange days 
in the prison where they consorted with a variety of 
captives that included Greeks, Armenians, Turkish 
officers, two Mohammedan notabilities from Cairo, a 
young Turkish prince who had been imprisoned for 
brawling in the Sultan's palace, and the prince's eunuch. 
Yeats-Brown and Paul, meantime, planned to escape 
from the famous old jail, a feat which no captive 
had yet performed since it was built, six hundred 
years ago. 

While walking in the garden one evening they slipped 
away from their guards, and mingled with a crowd of 
officials who were crossing the courtyard outside the 
Ministry of War. Swerving aside before they reached 
the sentried gate, the pair climbed over some railings — 
and were free once more. They walked across the 
Golden Horn Bridge, and so to Pera. There, once again, 
Miss Whittaker and her friends found them a place of 
concealment, near the deserted British Embassy. 

Then began for the escaped couple a period of flitting 
from one excitement to another. They became in- 
volved in a succession of underground activities; and, 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 239 

with the help of Greeks and the clever cooperation of 
Miss Whittaker, they spread around the city reports, 
beliefs, hopes, and arguments likely to influence citizens 
in favour of the Allies and against the Germans and 
Young Turks. They buried their identities under 
darkened hair, false moustaches, fezzes, and forged 
vecikas. 

Yeats-Brown's propaganda work brought him into 
contact with a small group of politicians and malcon- 
tents who were plotting a coup d'etat against the Young 
Turks. Although the miserable, exploited populace had 
no popular leader to voice its discontent there came a 
moment — while the Bulgars were at the gates of Adri- 
anople, communications with Germany were cut, the 
Allied Fleet threatened Dedeagatch and the citizens 
of Aleppo were preparing to surrender to Allenby's 
victorious cavalry — when everyone in Constantinople 
knew that Turkey was beaten. Open rebellion which 
was to have hanged Talaat, Enver, and Djemal Pashas 
high in the square of the Seraskarat then threatened. 

But the rising was still-born, owing to treachery. The 
Prefect of Police suddenly quadrupled his patrols, a few 
Turkish officers were arrested, a few more civilians were 
hanged, a few conspirators disappeared into the sub- 
merged world where men walked cautiously and in the 
shadow, a few machine guns were placed so as to com- 
mand a Greek cathedral, a couple of aged senators were 
executed for having "intrigued for a political resolution 
hostile to the Government"; and life went on as be- 
fore — upon the surface. ... 

But escaped prisoners did not live upon the surface. 
They were in touch with seditious elements beneath it. 



2 4 o EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Once when Yeats-Brown was in a certain cafe with 
some Greeks, and the talk was becoming wild as the 
arak bottle passed, there entered a detective known to 
everybody, even to the British officer, who was the 
youngest initiate in "crime" present. And without a 
whisper or a wink the talk swung, easily and naturally, 
from the rankest sedition to the most harmless com- 
monplace. 

"We will destroy the Young Turks!" said a speaker, 
"we will destroy the Young Turks and cut them in 
little pieces!" 

He was harmonizing his words with indescribably 
graphic gesture, when his expressive hands opened in a 
bland expression of resignation. 

"What, therefore, can we do, my friends?" he con- 
tinued. "We must remain calm, and retain our dig- 
nity as citizens of a great city.'" 

Nobody looked round or betrayed surprise; but the 
alien presence was sensed by all. Soon after this scene 
the meeting adjourned to a cellar, where a quiet, elderly 
gentleman, the proprietor of an hotel inhabited chiefly 
by German officers, declared himself desirous of cutting 
his clients' throats. 

In war-time Constantinople one grew accustomed to 
this atmosphere of melodrama, and learned not to re- 
gard it too seriously. The more one knows of the Con- 
st antinopolitans of to-day the less can one trust any 
estimate of them. Eternally fickle, like their fore- 
runners who looked on with ,equal enthusiasm at the 
triumph and execution of emperors and sultans, they 
saw no incongruity in the city's hero-worship of Enver 
Bey in 1908 and its deep detestation of Enver Pasha in 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 241 

19 1 8. Even now, after welcoming the French and 
British with mad joy one short year ago, they are rest- 
less, and again wear the cloak of conspiracy. 

The wayward fickleness of Constantinople ruined the 
Byzantine Greeks, and sapped the strength of the Ro- 
man Empire. Now, after a long period of fretful wed- 
lock, she is shaking herself free from the Turk. Who- 
ever next attempts to rule her will have some restless 
days and nights. 

At the beginning of September there arrived in Con- 
stantinople another escaped prisoner, who was to play 
an important part in the sensational events that pre- 
ceded the downfall of the Young Turks and their Ger- 
man partners. 

Several months earlier Lieutenant-Colonel New- 
combe, D.S.O., R.E., had been imprisoned in the Turk- 
ish Ministry of War, while awaiting court-martial for 
an attempted escape. After his acquittal, owing to 
lack of evidence, he was allowed into the city with the 
prison interpreter. In a Pera tea-shop he met Mile. 
"X", a Franco-Greek lady of Entente sympathies, who 
offered to help him in any way possible. A secret corre- 
spondence followed; and when Colonel Newcombe was 
sent to the prison camp at Broussa, Mile. "X", with 
her maid, followed him. 

She stayed at a small hotel, on the pretence of taking 
the sulphur baths for which Broussa was famous. Sev- 
eral meetings took place, including a rendezvous at the 
house of the local Austrian Consul, whose daughters 
were school-fellows of Mile. "X." 

The final interview at Broussa was when Colonel 
Newcombe, having obtained the clothes of an Arab 



242 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

imam* disguised himself in this dress and slipped out of 
camp unobserved. He walked to the hotel, and there 
the scheme of escape was definitely arranged. He 
then returned, and by climbing over a wall, got back 
into the prison house without being seen. 

Mile. "X" left Broussa for Constantinople. On 
the way she stopped at Mudania (the port of Broussa) 
to bargain with two Greek boatmen, who agreed to take 
the British officer across the Sea of Marmora. From 
Constantinople she had a letter smuggled to Broussa, 
explaining how the boatmen might be recognized. 

Having read the letter Colonel Newcombe again dis- 
guised himself as an Arab, and at dusk slipped away 
from the prison house, while another officer-prisoner 
distracted the guards' attention by running in the op- 
posite direction. He walked all night by moonlight, 
and reached Mudania next morning. 

Having found the Greeks, and paid a hundred dollars 
for the hire of their boat, he put to sea with them, A 
strong wind raged, so that he was fourteen hours on the 
Sea of Marmora, living during this time on bread and 
raisins. Finally he reached Constantinople and went 
to the house of Mile. "X"'s parents. 

Like White and myself, Colonel Newcombe planned 
to go to Russia. He, also, had his fill of adventure. 
Once, he remained safely hidden in Miss Whittaker's 
house while the police were searching it for Yeats- 
Brown and Paul. 

He wrote several anti-German proclamations for 
distribution among the Turkish soldiers, and concocted 
a letter to the Turkish army commanders, advising 

*Priest. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 243 

them to refuse further service unless a new ministry 
were formed. But the Turco-German debacle in the 
Near East, of which General Allenby's victories in 
Palestine and the Bulgarian surrender were the be- 
ginnings, made him abandon this work for something 
more important. Soon he found himself drawn into 
the very centre of the vortex of plotting that swirled 
around the Sultan, the Cabinet, and the Sublime Porte. 

The peace parties lacked a leader powerful enough 
to take open action; and when the old Sultan, who had 
been but a puppet dancing to the strings pulled by 
Talaat and Enver, died in July, they hoped to find one 
in his brother, the successor to the throne. 

The new ruler, although he was neither strong enough 
nor able enough to challenge the Young Turk leaders 
until after the Bulgarian armistice, certainly leaned 
toward the Entente and favoured peace. His first 
act was to send for the only English tailor in Constanti- 
nople, a civil prisoner, and to order several uniforms 
from him. 

The excitement among the Turkish politicians was 
indescribable. 

"Have you heard about Mr. Hayden, the English 
tailor? The Sultan said to him " And ru- 
mour made the Sultan tell the English tailor every- 
thing that was sensationally anti-German and anti- 
Enver. 

Had the Sultan opposed the Grand Vizier and Enver 
Pasha in July, he would have found support; for three- 
fourths of Constantinople detested the Government. 
But the constabulary were faithful to Enver, who could 
likewise have relied upon the many thousands of Ger- 



244 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

men troops concentrated in the city; and a premature 
attempt by the Sultan to withdraw Turkey from the 
war would have risked his life and his throne. 

The defection of Bulgaria had the effect of an un- 
expected cold douche on Enver and Talaat; who, after 
the Turkish occupation of Batoum and capture of Baku, 
had been dreaming of a Greater Turkey that was to 
include the Maritza basin, most of the Dobrudja, and 
the whole of the Caucasus from the Black Sea to the 
Caspian, with a sphere of influence extending eastward 
to Bokhara and Samarkand. Agents and gramophone 
records were carrying the voice of Enver all over the 
Moslem world. 

When the Balkan Railway was cut and daily reports 
of German retreats in France continued to arrive, even 
the Young Turk politicians began to desert the rotten 
ship of state. The opposition groups — the Liberal, 
the Navy, and the Khoja parties — raised their heads 
and began to intrigue for a complete surrender to the 
Allies. Djambolat Bey, the Minister of the Interior, 
resigned. Rahmi Bey, the powerful Vali of Smyrna, 
who throughout the war had shown every consideration 
to the Entente subjects in his vilayet, came to Constan- 
tinople with the avowed intention of working an im- 
mediate peace. Talaat was for bargain and compro- 
mise. Only Enver Pasha and his personal followers 
remained faithful to their German friends. The Sul- 
tan's chance had come. 

Colonel Newcombe decided on an audacious plan of 
action. He wrote a convincing memorandum, which 
suggested that if Turkey now sued for a separate peace 
she would obtain better terms than if she waited until 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 245 

Germany was thoroughly beaten. This memorandum, 
originally the draft of a proposed proclamation to the 
Turkish army, was taken by Miss Whittaker to a Com- 
mittee politician of her acquaintance. Eventually one 
copy of it was given to Fethi Bey, the new Minister of 
the Interior, and another passed through the hands of 
the Sultan's dentist to the Sultan himself. 

A week earlier — on September the twenty-ninth — ■ 
the Young Turk Cabinet had met to consider the Bul- 
garian demand for an armistice; and the Grand Vizier, 
who arrived from Germany by the last Balkan express 
that passed through Sofia, offered his resignation. At 
the time nobody could form an alternative ministry 
so Talaat again took up the reins of power. 

The Sultan and the Minister of the Interior received 
their copies of Colonel Newcombe's memorandum on 
October the fifth. During the intervening days it had 
become more and more plain that Germany was doomed 
to defeat. The Sultan and the Peace parties, there- 
fore, only wanted a suitable bludgeon for a coup de 
grace to the Ministry. 

They found it in this purely unofficial communication 
from an escaped prisoner of war. Colonel Newcombe's 
memorandum was produced and discussed at a stormy 
council of the Committee of Union and Progress, which 
resulted in the definite resignation of Talaat and Enver. 
Tewfik Pasha, Izzet Pasha, and other Opposition lead- 
ers were called into consulation by the Sultan. 

From being a hunted fugitive Colonel Newcombe 
suddenly found himself a person of consequence. As 
a special favour he was asked not to carry out his plans 
for escaping from Turkey, because the Ottoman Govern- 



246 EASTERN NIGHTS—AND FLIGHTS 

ment believed he would be useful in arranging an armis- 
tice. He met the Vali of Smyrna at the Tokatlian 
Hotel, and there the British prisoner and the high Turk- 
ish official shook hands and discussed the changing in- 
ternational situation. 

On October the sixteenth Colonel Newcombe, ac- 
companied by Miss Whittaker, went by appointment 
to the house of a politician, where he met the new Min- 
ister of the Interior, the Vali of Smyrna, and other nota- 
bilities. Over the dinner table the mighty questions of 
peace and war were then debated by an escaped prisoner 
of war and a prominent Minister of the country in 
which he was technically still a captive. 

Colonel Newcombe explained that though he worked 
for Allied and not Turkish interests, his friendly advice 
was that the Ottoman Government should sue immedi- 
ately for a separate armistice; because whereas Germany 
wanted to keep a weak Turkey whom she could domi- 
nate, the Allies' principle of the rights of nationality 
forbade any idea of complete domination. 

The Turks' attitude at this curious meeting was 
summed up in remarks made by the Minister of the 
Interior: 

"We know we have lost our chance. There have 
been mistakes in the past. We are practically bank- 
rupt. But we honestly hate the Germans, and, with- 
out kowtowing to the British, look to them to help us 
and to be our friends, as we want to be friends with 
them." 

Colonel Newcombe and the Turkish officials thrashed 
out such questions as Turkey's financial bankruptcy, 
the opening of the Dardanelles, the capitulations, 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 247 

autonomy for Armenia and Arabia, and punishment 
for the Armenian massacres and for the maltreatment 
of British prisoners from Kut-el-Amara (whereby 
nearly 80 per cent, of the latter had died). Then, after 
dinner was over, the Minister of the Interior dictated 
in French a long telegram, which the British officer was 
to send to Mr. Lloyd George as soon as he should reach 
Allied territory. 

Next day the Ministry tried to send him out of Tur- 
key by aeroplane, but failed because all aircraft was 
in the hands of the Germans. It was agreed that he 
should receive special passports and proceed, via 
Smyrna, to either Chios or Mudros. 

After the dinner party of the sixteenth events moved 
rapidly toward an armistice. The Vali of Smyrna 
caused a sensation two days later by stating openly, in 
the Journal d'Orient, that peace negotiations were 
in progress and that the Germans would have to go. 
Later in the day he again met Colonel Newcombe at 
the Tokatlian Hotel, and discussed the best means 
of approaching England for an armistice. By now the 
escaped colonel was going about Constantinople quite 
openly, although Yeats-Brown and Paul remained 
more or less in hiding. 

Meanwhile, General Townshend, who was still a pris- 
oner on Prinkipo Island, had also sent a memorandum 
to the Government. A Turkish armistice commission 
was formed, and he was asked by the Grand Vizier to 
accompany the delegates who were about to leave the 
country; which he did. It was arranged that Colonel 
Newcombe would follow in a few days' time. 

On his last night in Constantinople Colonel New- 



248 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

combe went by appointment to the terrace of the de- 
serted British Embassy, and there met Captain Yeats- 
Brown, who had slipped past the police into the Em- 
bassy grounds. It was a meeting that neither of them 
will ever forget. Below was the Golden Horn, shim- 
mering in the moonlight, and across its waters Stam- 
boul showed up dimly, quiet and apparently asleep. 
But the watchers on the Embassy terrace knew that 
the city might stir from slumber at any moment; for the 
Phanar was bristling with machine guns, St. Sophia 
was an armed camp, and, more terrible than all, people 
were starving in the streets. The waning sickle moon 
that rode above Stamboul seemed the symbol of the 
Turks' waning dominion over Christian peoples. Very 
soon the Crescent would go down. Very soon the Union 
Jack would float from the Embassy's barren flagstaff. 
Very soon Pera would be decked with banners, and 
an Allied fleet would proclaim an end to the nightmare 
of famine and oppression. 

Next day Colonel Newcombe, who had been handed 
civilian passports by the Minister of the Interior, travel- 
led from Constantinople to Smyrna. Finally he left 
Turkey, as a special adviser, in the company of Raouf 
Bey, the new Minister of Marine. The party put to 
sea in a trawler, and were picked up by H.M.S. Liver- 
pool. They were taken to Mudros, where the British 
Admiral Commander-in-Chief and General Townshend 
Were already negotiating with the Turkish delegates. 

Up to the very end the Young Turk leaders hoped to 
hold the real, if not the ostensible, control in Constanti- 
nople. Captain Yeats-Brown was told by a politician 
that "nobody but Talaat could possibly manage Tur- 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 249 

key," and that "the English, if they come, would be 
well advised to deal with the Committee of Union and 
Progress, as there is no other real party in the country. 
They not only have all the money, but all the brains and 
energy as well." Which last statement was nearly true. 

But when it came to saying that Talaat was one of 
the dominant brains of the century, and comparable 
as a statesman only to Lloyd George, the disguised Brit- 
ish officer could not help smiling and suggesting: "Surely 
Talaat is not indispensable? If he goes, another ex- 
telegraphist may arise, as good as he!" 

This the members of the Committee of Union and 
Progress regarded as near-blasphemy; but the fact 
that all the Young Turk leaders were self-made men, 
with little knowledge of the science and history of mod- 
ern government, was one of the causes why Von Wan- 
genheim, Von Bernstorff, and other emissaries of Ger- 
man Imperialism were able, for four years, to inspire 
a policy of Turkey for the Germans. 

The sudden volte face of the Turkish press, the an- 
nouncement of the armistice terms, the flight of the 
three chief criminals (Talaat, Enver, and Djemal 
Pashas), and the downfall of the swaggering Germans 
brought great joy to the miserable populace of Con- 
stantinople. They vented their feelings in delirious 
enthusiasm over some released prisoners who visited 
Pera, wearing their carefully hoarded khaki uniforms. 

The curtain was down, the sordid tragedy of op- 
pression and corruption was over. The new era opened 
in the mist of a November morning, with the long, low 
lines of an Allied fleet steaming very slowly past the 
lies des Princes toward the Bosphorus. 



CHAPTER XV 

STOWAWAYS, INC. 

Titoff was head of a syndicate of ship's officers which 
might have named itself "Stowaways, Incorporated." 
He was the schemer-in-chief; and the others, while dis- 
liking him heartily, were content to rely on his supe- 
rior cunning. Besides ourselves the syndicate under- 
took to carry across the Black Sea a Greek, a Jewess 
(both of them wanted by the Turkish police), and four 
passportless prostitutes; all of whom, to the extent of 
some hundred dollars apiece, wished to leave Constan- 
tinople for Odessa. 

Most of the crew, also, were smuggling men, women, 
or material across the Black Sea. The crew itself included 
four Russian soldiers, who had escaped from prison camps 
in Turkey, and were passing themselves off as sea- 
men. The bo'sun's particular line of business was a 
woman thief who had with her a heavy purse and a trunk 
full of property, stolen from a merchant who had been 
her dear friend. Katrina, the kitchen girl who brought 
us our food, invested in a well-to-do Turkish deserter. 

As for the non-human contraband, it was stowed in 
every corner of the vessel — cocaine, opium, raw leather, 
tobacco, cognac, and quinine. Prices were extravagant 
enough in Constantinople, but in Russia they were 
colossal. The difference in the price of drugs, for ex- 

250 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 251 

ample, often amounted to hundreds per cent. The de- 
mand for cocaine as contraband was so great during the 
week before we actually sailed that by the end of it the 
chemists of Pera and Galata would sell none under 500 
dollars a kilo; but in Odessa, we heard, one might dis- 
pose of it without difficulty for a thousand dollars a kilo. 
Even White and I became infected by the contraband 
craze and, with Kulman as partner, gambled success- 
fully on a consignment of leather and so covered most 
of our escape expenses. 

At dusk, when we left the wireless cabin and paced 
the shadowed portion of the deck for exercise, we often 
saw a rowing boat creeping toward whichever side of 
the Batoum happened not to face the shore. Somebody 
in it would exchange low whistlings with somebody on 
deck — the somebody often being Titoff. When the 
boat had been made fast to the bottom of the gangway, 
a figure, or two figures, would climb to the deck and dis- 
appear. Sometimes they brought and left a package; 
sometimes it was a visitor himself — or herself — who 
did not depart with the rowing boat. 

Besides the mystery traffic from shore to ship there 
was also a certain amount from ship to shore. For this 
the steward — a Russian Jew — was responsible. A 
Turkish merchant had chartered the Batoum for the 
coming voyage, and since our many delays in sailing 
were the result of his haggling with government officials 
over the amount of baksheesh to be paid for permission 
to export, he undertook to feed the officers and crew for 
as long as they remained at Constantinople. Inciden- 
tally, he unknowingly fed White and myself, besides 
the other stowaways and the escaped Russian soldiers. 



252 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

The steward ordered more provisions than were needed; 
and a few hours after the delivery of each consignment 
a boatload would be sent back to the quay and carted 
to the bazaars. TitofF, who organized the sale* shared 
the proceeds with the steward. 

TitofFs methods of graft took him into many dubious 
by-paths, notably those around the offices of a Greek 
coal dealer. After preliminary plottings, with Viktor 
as interpreter, he ordered a hundred tons. The coal 
dealer delivered ninety, the bill for a hundred was pre- 
sented to the Turkish merchant, and TitofF and the 
Greek split the value of the missing ten tons. It was 
easy enough for the chief engineer to make good the 
deficit by burning ten tons more on paper than in the 
furnaces. 

With all this illicit traffic in men and goods there were 
some restless half hours during the last few days of our 
stay in the Bosphorus. Trouble was caused by the 
bo'sun's woman-thief, whose presence among us the 
Pera police suspected. Five times they searched for 
her. The bo'sun detailed a man to watch the shore, 
and whenever a police launch appeared this look-out 
would blow a whistle. All the stowaways then scurried 
to their various hiding-places. 

White and I, being the most dangerous cargo, were 
given the safest — and certainly the dirtiest — hiding-place 
of all. This was in the ballast-tanks, at the very bottom 
of the ship, underneath the propeller shaft. The entrance 
to them was through a narrow manhole, covered by a 
cast-iron lid, about twenty yards down a dark passage 
leading from the engine-room to the propeller. 

The alarm having been given, Feodor, the second 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 253 

engineer, would lead us along the passage by the light 
of a taper, remove some boards, raise the lid, and help 
us to wriggle into the black cavity below. Our feet 
would be covered by six inches of bilge-water while we 
crouched down, so as to leave him room enough to re- 
place the iron cover and re-lay the wooden boards that 
hid it. Then, one at a time and with our knees squelch- 
ing in the water, we crawled from tank to tank. 

Half-way along the line of tanks were two that con- 
tained small mattresses, which the second engineer had 
placed in position for us. After the first day they were 
sodden with the bilge-water; but at any rate it was bet- 
ter to sit on them than in the water itself. The limited 
space, however, made it impossible for us to be seated 
in any but a very cramped position, with hunched-up 
shoulders rubbing against the slime that coated the 
sides of each tank. Standing was impossible, and lying 
down meant leaning one's head on the wet mattress 
and soaking one's feet in the drain of bilge that swished 
backward and forward with every motion of the ship. 

Complete blackness surrounded us. The air was 
dank and musty, so that matches sputtered only feebly 
when struck, and the light from a taper was hardly 
strong enough to chase the darkness from the half of 
each small tank. 

When, after each search, the police returned to their 
launch we would hear the heavy boots of the second 
engineer tramping along the passage overhead. As we 
listened to the nerve-edging noise that accompanied 
the removal of the boards and the iron lid we crouched 
into the best-hidden corners of our respective tanks, 
not knowing whether a friend or a policeman was at the 



254 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

entrance. We scarcely breathed until there " came, 
booming and echoing through the hollow compart- 
ments, the word "Signor!" — the second engineer's 
password denoting that all was clear, and that we might 
return to the engine-room. 

The twenty-second of August was the final date fixed 
for the departure. By late afternoon of the twenty- 
first all the Turkish merchant's cargo, legitimate and 
otherwise, had been brought from the quay by lighters, 
and thence transferred by winches to the Batoum's 
hatches. The export officials had been squared, the ship's 
papers were passed and stamped, the bunkers were 
fully loaded with inferior coal. All on board, from the 
captain to the least-considered stowaway, were content, 
although nervous of what might happen during the 
next twenty-four hours. 

At about five o'clock we received a welcome visit 
from Vladimir Wilkowsky, the Polish aviator who had 
acted as our intermediary from Psamatia. He bribed 
his guard to remain in Stamboul while he crossed the 
bridge to Galata, and hired the kaik that brought him 
to the Batoum. He himself intended to follow us 
across the Black Sea by escaping on the next steamer 
to leave Constantinople for Odessa. Meanwhile, we 
were especially glad to see him, for he brought from 
Mr. S. the fifteen hundred dollars for which we had 
waited so anxiously. In return we sent improvised 
cheques written on strips of foolscap paper. 

We now had enough money to pay Titoff's exorbitant 
fee, and still leave funds to live in Odessa for some 
weeks. Two German revolvers, bought for us in the 
bazaar by Kulman, added to the feeling of security. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 255 

Wilkowsky claimed to have sent on board the food 
and clothing which we left at Psamatia, and he was 
able to confirm our suspicions that Titoff must have 
stolen it. For the present, however, we refrained from 
tackling the chief engineer, wishing to avoid a scandal 
before departure. We promised ourselves to deal with 
him adequately at Odessa. 

That evening there were more than the usual number 
of mysterious visits from small boats. The full comple- 
ment of stowaways was taken aboard, the last cases 
of contraband shipped. Until a late hour the engine- 
room resounded to the hammerings of Feodor and Josef, 
who were hiding a late consignment of cocaine. Our 
own investment in raw leather was in Kulman's cabin. 

The firemen and greasers celebrated their farewell 
in the usual manner. By nine o'clock several were 
roaring drunk. One of them — the Bolshevik who had 
told of the drowning of Baltic fleet officers — staggered 
across the aft deck with a drawn knife in his hand, 
shouting that he wanted to finish off the third engineer, 
who had insulted him. He found Josef in the engine- 
room, but was cowed and disarmed when the engineer 
threatened him with a revolver. He let himself be led 
away, while verbally murdering all officers in general 
and Josef in particular. 

At 6.30 in the morning Josef, the third engineer, 
roused us from our sleep on the floor of his cabin and 
invited us to the ballast-tanks; for as the police and 
customs officers would be on board most of the time 
until we weighed anchor, we must remain hidden until 
the Batoum left Turkish waters. 

Since we expected to be hidden for about twelve 



256 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

hours, we took with us a loaf of bread, some dried saus- 
age, and a bottle of water. After a last look, through 
the port-hole, at Seraglio Point and the domes of Stam- 
boul, I passed below, hoping and expecting that when I 
next looked to the open air we should be clear of Turkey. 

For a long while nothing happened to take our 
thoughts from the cramped space and the foul air of the 
tanks. We breakfasted sparingly, and allowed our- 
selves one cigarette apiece. More we dared not smoke, 
because of the effect on the oppressive atmosphere. 

Then, at about ten o'clock, we heard from above a 
succession of three thuds, the signal to all stowaways in 
the region of the engine-room that the police were on 
board. We made ourselves as comfortable as possible, 
and took minute care to make no sound. 

We waited in frantic impatience for the noises from the 
engine-room that would denote a getting-up of steam. 
At half-past eleven there began a continuous, rhythmic 
spurting, which we took to be the sound of the engines 
in action. Soon afterward a grinding and scraping 
from the deck convinced us that the anchor was being 
raised. 

"Put it there, old man," said White, thrusting his 
hand through the hole that linked our respective tanks. 
"We're leaving Turkey at last! 5 ' 

But not yet were we leaving Turkey. The noise from 
the engine-room was merely that of a pump preparing 
the pressure. After three-quarters of an hour it quiet- 
ed as suddenly as it had begun, and we realized that 
the Batoum was still moored jn the Bosphorus, between 
Seraglio Point and the Sultan's palace of Dolma 
Bagtche. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 257 

And then, soon after noon, came the real music for 
which we had waited so anxiously. The telegraph from 
the bridge tinkled, a fuller and more throaty rhythm 
came from the engine-room, loud grinding and rattling 
from the deck testified that the anchor had parted 
company with the bottom of the Bosphorus. A few 
minutes later we felt the ship swinging round, and a 
swishing and rushing of water told us that this time we 
really were away. In silence we shook hands again. 

For long hours we remained in the slimy tanks, 
crouched on the sodden mattresses. But it was no 
longer purgatory. The swish-swish of the screw chased 
away all sensation of discomfort, and there remained 
only the realization that we had left Constantinople and 
soon would have left Turkey. My old habit of sub- 
consciously fitting metre and rhymes to mechanical 
rhythm, to which I had succumbed many times when 
seated behind aeroplane motors, began to assert itself 
as we sat in the darkness and listened to the penetrating 
throb-throb from the engine-room above us. Incon- 
gruously enough the unbidden lines that continued to 
pass maddeningly through my mind, in time with the 
steady rise and fall of the piston, were those of a G. K. 
Chesterton ballad: 



If I had been a heathen 

I'd have kissed Naera's curls, 

And filled my life with love affairs, 

My house with dancing girls. 

But Higgins is a heathen; 

And to meetings he is forced 

Where his aunts, who are not married, 

Demand to be divorced. 



258 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

These words held sway for five hours of insistent, 
monotonous chugging. They were succeeded by an 
extract from the Prodigal Son : 

Here come I to my own again, 
Fed, forgiven and known again, 
Claimed by bone of my bone again, 
And sib to flesh of my flesh. 
The fatted calf is dressed for me; 
But the husks have greater zest for me — 
I think my pigs will be best for me, 
So I'm off to the styes afresh. 

By early evening, we had calculated, the Batoum 
should be leaving Turkish territorial waters and enter- 
ing the Black Sea. Just before six there came the 
shock of a bitter disappointment. The captain's tele- 
graph clanged, the engines subdued to dead slow, the 
vessel swung round into the tide and seemed to remain 
almost stationary for a quarter of an hour. We had 
expected a last search by the Turkish customs author- 
ities at the outlet of the Bosphorus and surmised that 
this was the reason for the slackened speed. But a re- 
petition of the whirring and clanking on deck, followed 
by a loud splash, showed that the anchor was in action 
again, and that something more important than a mere 
search was on hand. For two hours longer we remained 
in the blackness, unenlightened and very anxious. Then, 
after the usual removal of the boards and the lid, there 
floated through the tanks a low-voiced "Signor!" 

Feodor, candle in hand, was waiting for us. He 
whispered a warning to make as little noise as possible, 
because two Turkish officials were on board. Having 



EASTERN EIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 259 

reconnoitred to make sure that the way to Josefs cabin 
was clear, he led us there. The delay, it appeared, was 
because the Turkish merchant had left some clearance 
papers at Constantinople. He had gone for the capital 
by automobile, and meanwhile two of the Customs 
Police would remain on the Batoum. The merchant 
was expected to return with the missing document next 
morning, when permission to leave would be given. 

We slept in the cabin, and at dawn descended once 
more to the ship's bowels. We spent five more hours 
of purgatory in the ballast-tanks. The Batoum re- 
mained motionless during three of them, but the last 
two were enlivened by the swish-swish of displaced 
water as it passed the flanks of the vessel. Finally we 
heard for the last time the blessed signal " Signor!" 

" Fineesh Turkey" said Feodor, as he smiled and 
helped us through the manhole. Gone was the Bos- 
phorus, and in its place we saw the leaden waters of the 
Black Sea. From the port-hole of Josefs cabin we 
could distinguish many miles west of us the coastline 
of the country in which White had spent three years 
of the most dreadful captivity. 

Feodor soon left us, for he had to bring other stowa- 
ways into the light of day. From every concealed 
cranny of the vessel men and women, almost as light- 
hearted as ourselves at deliverance from the Turks, 
were coming into the open. 

One of the stowaways, a passportless woman whom 
the aged captain was taking with him to Odessa, did 
not rejoice for some time. As hiding-place for her the 
ancient had chosen a deep locker in his chart room on the 
bridge* There she had remained for the past two days. 



2 6o EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Now Katrina, the kitchen wench, knew nothing of the 
captain's lady. That morning, not wishing to send 
him back to the bunkers, where he had spent the pre- 
vious day, she thought of the locker as a temporary home 
for her own particular stowaway — a Turkish deserter 
with coal-blackened face, untrimmed beard, and de- 
cidedly odorous clothes. She dumped the Turk inside 
the locker, fastened the lid, and ran back to the kitchen. 

The Turkish deserter landed with some violence on 
the captain's lady, and both received a bad fright as 
they clutched at each other in the darkness. Yet the 
lid could not be removed from the inside, and the shouts 
were unheard outside the little room. The air in the 
unventilated locker grew ever more stuffy and velvety 
as the two people continued to breathe it. Finally the 
woman fainted. The Turk, tired out after a long spell 
of cramped wakefulness in the bunkers and the kitchen, 
composed himself philosophically and went to sleep. 

When the Batoum was beyond the Bosphorus and all 
danger of a search the captain opened the locker to re- 
lease his friend. He inserted an arm, and jumped with 
fright when, instead of a female, he produced a coal- 
blackened man. The woman revived when taken into 
the fresh air, but I should imagine that never again will 
she become a stowaway. 

Titofif, fearing that some informer among the pas- 
sengers might notice us, still kept White and myself 
under cover all day, until we took our usual exercise on 
deck each evening. The other stowaways were ming- 
ling with legitimate passengers, whose bedding was 
spread over the hatches. 

I remember in particular a vivid-looking, much- 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 261 

jewelled Jewess, who was minus money and passport. I 
found her exchanging violent words with two firemen, 
who were levying blackmail, using the Austrian port 
authorities at Odessa as bogey-men. When, with tears 
and protests, she had fulfilled their demands, two other 
ruffians from among the crew took their place and de- 
manded money, or in default jewels. 

All the stowaways, in fact, except ourselves, were 
blackmailed in this fashion. The woman thief was 
victimized less universally than the others because she 
was known to be the bo'sun's especial graft. As for us, 
we were under the protection of the ship's officers, and, 
more important still, we carried revolvers. In any 
case, Bolshevik Bill the Greaser was our good friend 
and a power among the crew. 

On the second evening at sea the firemen stole a case 
of drak from the cargo, drank themselves amok, and 
told Josef they were far too busy over private concerns 
to trouble about stoking the furnaces. The private 
concerns were mostly women from among the stowa- 
ways and poorer passengers. 

The fires sank lower and lower, the engine-power 
dwindled, the propeller revolved more and more slowly. 
Finally we came to almost a dead halt in the middle of 
the Black Sea. Throughout that night we crawled 
forward with a minimum number of revolutions; and 
even this small progress was only because the ship's 
officers took turns in the furnace-room to act as stokers. 
Next morning the sobered firemen graciously agreed 
to let bygones be bygones, and resumed work. 

The rest of that nightmare voyage included only one 
incident worth recording. On the morning of the fourth 



262 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

day, when we should have been within sight of land, 
the horizon in every direction was blank. The Turkish 
merchant who had chartered the Batoum was impatient 
to reach Odessa, and asked the captain for our position. 
The ancient tugged at his white beard, and said he 
was not quite sure, but would take soundings. These 
revealed shallow water, showing, according to the 
chart, that the ship must be some distance off her 
course. 

The dodderer was astonished, and called the first 
mate into consultation. BelaePs calculations with 
sextant and compass proved us to be heading several 
degrees too far east, so that the then line of sailing would 
have taken us nearer Sevastopol than Odessa. There- 
upon the captain handed over the ship's direction to the 
first mate. We edged northward, and sighted Odessa 
at noon of the next day. 

The city, with its pleasant terraces round the hills 
that slope to the foot of the wide-curved bay, and its 
half- Western, half-Byzantine towers and domes gleam- 
ing yellow-gold in the sunlight, looked inviting enough. 
But for us it represented a gamble in the unknown. 
Odessa was in enemy occupation, and might be more 
inhospitable even than Constantinople. On the 
other hand, we should no longer be on the police list 
of wanteds, as in Turkey, and it would be easier to pass 
muster among Russians than among dark-skinned 
Levantines. 

On the whole, we were optimistic. From Odessa a 
man with friends and money might make his way to 
Siberia, where were some Allied detachments; and if, 
as the latest news indicated* Bulgaria was about to be 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 263 

emptied of Austro-German forces, Odessa would be a 
good jumping-off point for Sofia. 

Meanwhile, our immediate concern was to get ashore 
without meeting the dock officials. Kulman and Josef 
promised to escort us, and thus lend the protection of 
their uniforms. We ourselves discarded seamen's 
clothes for the mufti worn when we escaped from the 
Turkish guards. White still had no lounge coat, and 
although it was a hot day of August had to put on his 
faded old overcoat. For the rest, the luggage we were 
bringing to Russia — each of us possessed a toothbrush, 
some cartridges, a revolver, a comb, and a razor, a spare 
shirt, a spare collar, and two handkerchiefs — could be 
wrapped in two sheets of newspaper. 

Before we left there was a dramatic ceremony when we 
paid for our unauthorized passage, and incidentally got 
even with Michael Ivanovitch Titoff. He had reck- 
oned on taking the money himself and dividing it as he 
pleased. We, knowing that Titoff could best be punished 
by hitting at his avarice, explained to Kulman, Josef, 
and Feodor that as they had done more for us than the 
chief engineer, we wanted them to receive a share corre- 
sponding to their risks and services, and proposed to 
hand all the money to them for distribution. From 
TitofPs share we would deduct the value of what he had 
stolen from us, and also whatever we thought excessive 
in his charges for food. 

Each of the trio had his own grievances against Titoff, 
and all were delighted with the opportunity of making 
money at his expense. We prepared a balance sheet, 
and invited Titoff into Josefs cabin. 

Josef, as TitofFs subordinate, had been scared of 



264 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

offending him. Four glasses of neat vodka, however, 
gave him courage, and when the chief engineer entered 
the cabin he was the most aggressive of us all. 

"Michael Ivanovitch," he said, glaring at Titoff 
with bloodshot eyes, "we are no longer at Constanti- 
nople, and our friends here insist on a just distribution 
of their money. This " — handing him the balance sheet 
and a list of his own — "is how it will be divided." 

The chief rogue glared his indignation as White 
handed a handful of banknotes to Josef, and voiced it 
when he received the balance sheet. He stood up and 
declaimed against the deductions, but soon subsided in 
face of the row of unfriendly faces, the grins, and the 
revolvers which White and I kept well in evidence. 

"There is nothing more to be settled," said White. 
"Here we are among friends. Now leave us." 

And Titoff went. At the door he turned and said to 
Josef with evil meaning in his voice: "I shall have busi- 
ness with you later." Josef laughed, and with a shaky 
hand poured himself out another glass of vodka. 

The last we saw of Michael Ivanovitch Titoff was 
his yellow face leaning over the side of the ship when, 
with Kulman and Josef, we rowed toward the docks. 
They were taking us on shore before the customs officers 
boarded the Batoum. The other stowaways, who were 
mingling with the legitimate passengers on the deck, 
were to come later. 

The harbour was chock-full of forlorn-looking craft, 
which had evidently lain idle for a long while. We 
dodged around and about several of them, so as not to 
give the appearance of coming from the Batoum, and 
then made for the nearest quay. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 265 

On it was an Austrian officer. When we were some 
fifty yards distant he looked at us through field-glasses, 
and proceeded to detail a group of soldiers to various 
points on the quay, evidently with the object of stopping 
and questioning us. 

Kulman, who was at the tiller, gave an order to the 
sailor at the oars. We swung round a bend of the shore, 
and lost sight of the Austrians. Close ahead was an- 
other landing-stage. We moored beside it. Without 
waiting a second, but also without showing haste, we 
stepped from the boat and climbed the steps — Kulman 
and I first, and then Josef and White. 

Two Austrian sentries and some Russian officials 
stood at the top of the steps. They looked hard at us, 
but, satisfied by the uniforms of Kulman and Josef, 
merely nodded a greeting as we passed toward the 
dock gates and comparative freedom. 



CHAPTER XVI 

A RUSSIAN INTERLUDE 

Odessa, like the rest of the Ukraine, had exchanged 
Bolshevism for Austro-German domination and confis- 
cation. Already, when we passed through the docks, it 
was easy to see who were the masters. Austrian cus- 
toms officers controlled the quays; Austrian and Ger- 
man soldiers guarded the storehouses; Austrian sentries 
stood at the dock gates and sometimes demanded to 
see civilians' passports. Had we not been vouched for 
by the uniforms of the Batoum's third engineer and 
third mate, the sentries might well have stopped White 
and me. 

Once outside the gates we hired a cab, and drove to 
an address given us by Mr. S. — that of the sister and the 
mother of a Russian professor at Robert College, Con- 
stantinople. Arrived there, we left Josef and Kulman, 
with very sincere expressions of goodwill. 

The professor's sister received us cordially but 
calmly, as if it were an everyday event for two down- 
at-heel British officers to drop on her from the skies 
with a letter of introduction but without the least 
warning. 

"Why; only three days ago," she related, "two offi- 
cers of the Russian Imperial Army arrived here under 
like circumstances. They made their way from Petro- 

266 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 267 

grad, through the Soviet territory. They now occupy 
the room below ours. 

Once again Providence seemed to have played into 
our hands; for when these ex-officers were asked how 
best we could live in the German-occupied city, they 
produced the two false passports by means of which 
they had travelled through Bolshevist Russia. They 
now lived in the Ukraine under their own names and 
with their own identity papers; and the false passports, 
no longer necessary to them, they handed to White and 
me. 

Without passports we could scarcely have found 
lodging or rations, for every non-Ukrainian in Odessa 
had to register with the Austrian authorities. Tom 
White, therefore, became Serge Feodorovitch Davidoff, 
originally from Turkestan, and I became Evgeni Nes- 
torovitch Genko, a Lett from Riga. This origin suited 
me very well; for the Letts, although former subjects 
of Imperial Russia, can mostly speak the German pa- 
tois of the Baltic Provinces. My passport made me a 
young bachelor, but White's allotted him a missing wife 
named Anastasia, aged nineteen. 

There were still in Odessa a few British subjects who 
had remained through the dreadful days of the Bol- 
shevist occupation and the more peaceful Austro-Ger- 
man regime. It happened that the professor's sister 
knew one of them, a leather manufacturer named Hat- 
ton. In his house we found refuge until other arrange- 
ments could be made. Like most people in Odessa, he 
showed us every kindness in his power, as did his Rus- 
sian wife and her relations. It was, however, unwise to 
remain for long with an Englishman, for he himself 



268 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

would have been imprisoned if the Austrians discovered 
that he was harbouring two British officers. 

The professor's sister played providence yet again, 
and produced another invaluable friend — one Vladimir 
Franzovitch B., a hard-up lieutenant in the Ukrainian 
artillery. Vladimir Franzovitch lived in two small 
rooms. The larger one he shared with us, there being 
just room enough for three camp beds placed side by 
side and touching each other. The second room was 
occupied by his mistress. 

Obviously the situation had its drawbacks. It also 
had its advantages, as the rooms were in one of the city's 
poorest quarters. The neighbours, therefore, included 
no enemy soldiers, for the Germans and Austrians had 
naturally spread themselves over the more comfortable 
districts. 

The dvornik was an old sergeant of the Imperial Guard, 
with a bitter hatred of Bolshevism and all its works. 
The tale which Vladimir Franzovitch told of us — that 
we were English civilians escaped from Moscow — was 
in itself a guarantee that he would befriend us. He 
took our false passports to the food commissioners, and 
thus obtained bread and sugar rations for Serge Feo- 
dorovitch Davidoff and Evgeni Nestorovitch Genko. 

Our principal interest was now in the news from Bul- 
garia, for on it hinged our future movements. We 
visited Hatton each day to obtain translations from the 
local press. These I supplemented from the two-day- 
old newspapers of Lemberg and Vienna, bought at the 
kiosk. 

The Bulgarian armistice was an accomplished fact, 
but the German troops had been given a month to leave 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 269 

Bulgaria. Our problem was whether to remain in 
Odessa until the end of this month and then try to make 
for Bulgaria, or to leave for Siberia at once. 

Wilkowsky all but tipped the scales in favour of Si- 
beria. He arrived suddenly from Constantinople, hav- 
ing hidden on a steamer that weighed anchor a few days 
after the Batoum's departure. From being a penniless 
prisoner, without even the means of corresponding with 
his family, he was now prosperous and comfortable; for 
his father was a wealthy lawyer living in Odessa, and 
his uncle Minister of Justice in Skoropadsky's Ukrain- 
ian Cabinet. 

Among his friends was the local commissary of General 
Denikin, whose volunteer army, composed of Kuban 
Cossacks and ex-officers of the Imperial Army, was 
preparing to advance against the Bolshevist forces in 
the Caucasus. Every few days the commissary sent a 
party of ex-officers, by way of Novorosisk, to the volun- 
teer Army Headquarters at Ekaterinodar. General 
Denikin was hoping for aid from the Allies; so that the 
commissary was delighted at the chance of enlisting 
two British aviators. His offer was that we should fly 
with Denikin's army for a few weeks and help to organize 
the Flying Corps, after which we could proceed by aero- 
plane to some Allied detachment in Siberia. 

The adventure seemed attractive, and we hesitated 
over it. But illness took the decision from our hands. 
I was laid low by yellow jaundice, and unable to travel 
with the next party that left for Novorosisk. Weak- 
ened as I was by various forms of hardship, several days 
passed before I recovered, under the kind-hearted minis- 
trations of Elena Stepanovna, Hatton's Russian wife. 



2 7 o EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

The aftermath of jaundice once brought us what we 
least desired — conspicuousness. In hot weather the 
Russians living around the Black Sea bathe from the 
beach in the altogether. There, men's bathing cos- 
tumes attract almost as much attention as would a lack 
of them at Brighton or Atlantic City. Hatton, White, 
and I formed a bathing party soon after I felt better. 
Until we were crossing the beach below the public gar- 
dens none of us realized that the colour of my skin was 
still a warm yellow. The spectacle of a yellow man in 
all his nakedness drew many sightseers from the gar- 
dens, including Austrian soldiers. I dressed under 
cover of a rock, and lost no time in leaving the gardens. 

No sooner was I free from jaundice than fate sent 
another setback. White and I succumbed to the plague 
of influenza which swept across Europe from west to 
east, and which in one week killed forty thousand in- 
habitants of Odessa. For three days we lay in Vladi- 
mir Franzovitch's little room, weak, feverish, miserable, 
and at times light-headed, while his mistress fed us 
with milk and heaped every kind of clothing over us 
for warmth. 

Recovery was hastened by the best possible tonic — 
news that the way to Varna, on the Bulgarian coast, 
was open to us. Thanks were due to several good 
friends for this means to freedom. Hatton had intro- 
duced us to a cosmopolitan Britisher named Waite, who 
enlisted the help of Louis Demy, a Russian sea-captain. 
Demy spoke of us to Commodore Wolkenau, the 
Ukrainian officer who, under the Austrians, controlled the 
shipping at Odessa. Wolkenau, having been an officer 
of the Russian Imperial Navy, was a good friend of the 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 271 

British. Moreover, the daily bulletins made it appar- 
ent that the Allies were winning the war, so that he was 
glad of an opportunity to prove his sympathies by help- 
ing British officers. He arranged for our passage on a 
Red Cross ship which was to repatriate Russian pris- 
oners from Austria, now waiting at Varna. 

Meantime, there was an interval of ten days' waiting 
before the boat would sail. These we passed in moving 
about the city, in consorting with Ukrainian officers and 
officials introduced by Wilkowsky, and in collecting in- 
formation likely to be of use to the British Intelligence 
Department. 

Our usual companion was one Pat OTlaherty, an 
Irishman on the staff of the Eastern Telegraph Com- 
pany, who had stayed in Odessa during the Bolshevist 
and Austro-German occupations. Entering a cafe with 
OTlaherty was like a blindfold draw in a sweepstake 
of identities. Always he met friends; but until the 
moment of introduction neither we nor he knew how or 
as what we were to be presented. To one man we were 
merchants from Nikolaieff; to another, motor-car agents 
from Moscow; to a third oil experts returned from 
Baku. 

"Signor Califatti, ,, said OTlaherty on one occasion, 
presenting me to a wealthy Jewish speculator. 

"When he was at Nijni Novgorod Fair," he con- 
tinued in all seriousness," SignorCalifatti bought a beau- 
tiful fur overcoat. He now wants to sell it. Perhaps 
you would like to buy it." 

The Jew offered a thousand roubles for the mythical 
overcoat, provided it conformed to the Irishman's 
declaration that it was of first-class astrakhan, in four 



272 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

skins; while White and I remained speechless with as- 
tonishment, embarrassment, and the desire to grin. 

In those days the Bolsheviki of Odessa, after months 
of suppression by the German Military Command, were 
beginning to raise their heads again. There was much 
talk of a withdrawal of German and Austrian troops 
from the Ukraine, to reinforce the French and Italian 
fronts. The Bolsheviki were ready, if this happened, 
to rise up and capture the city. 

The possession of arms by civilians was strictly for- 
bidden, and any man found in the streets with a revolver 
was liable to be shot offhand by Austrian soldiers or 
Ukrainian gendarmes. But the Bolsheviki laughed at 
the many proclamations anent the handing over of fire- 
arms. They hid rifles, revolvers, and ammunition in 
cellars and attics, or buried them in the ground. 

Many of our neighbours in the working-class quarter 
were Bolsheviki. Often they scowled at and threat- 
ened Vladimir Franzovitch, as he passed them in his 
uniform of a lieutenant of the Ukrainian artillery; and 
it was evident that when the Austrians withdrew our 
room would be rather more dangerous as a home than 
a powder factory threatened by fire. 

The consul of Soviet Russia was preparing lists of 
men willing to serve in the corps of Red Guards that had 
been planned, and was spending hundreds of thousands 
of roubles in propaganda. An immediate rising was 
threatened; whereupon Austrian and Ukrainian mil- 
itary police surrounded the consulate, captured the 
lists, and arrested and imprisoned the consul and two 
hundred Bolsheviki who had given their names as pros- 
pective Red Guards. Sixty of them were shot. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 273 

Even that lesson failed to frighten the half-starved 
men who lurked in the poorer quarters. Often, in the 
evening, they haunted the streets in small gangs that 
held up passers-by and stripped them of their pocket- 
books and watches, and sometimes of their clothes. 

The ugliest aspect of an ugly situation was that many 
soldiers of the Austrian forces, particularly the Mag- 
yars and the Poles, sympathized with the Bolsheviki, and 
were ready to join them, exchanging uniform for looted 
civilian suits if the troops were withdrawn. The sud- 
den realization that Austria was beaten, coupled with 
hatred of Austrian Imperialism, went to their heads 
like new wine. They foresaw an era in which the work- 
ing man and the private soldier would grab whatever 
they wanted. Bands of Hungarian privates proved 
their belief in this millennium by sacking the warehouses 
in the docks under cover of night. 

Odessa was overfull of members of the bourgeoisie 
who had flocked to what they regarded as the last refuge 
against Bolshevism in European Russia. Refugees 
had swelled the population from six hundred thousand 
to a million and a half. The middle classes — profes- 
sional men, merchants, traders, and speculators — knew 
they were living on the edge of a volcano, and tried to 
drown the knowledge in reckless revelry. Each even- 
ing parties costing thousands of roubles were given in 
the restaurants. Wine and vodka, as aids to forget- 
fulness of the fear that hovered over every feast, were 
well worth their sixty roubles a bottle. 

Their orgy of speculation in inflated prices and their 
mock merriment left the bourgeoisie neither time nor 
energy to take action against the horrors that threat- 



274 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

ened them. In general they adopted a pose of fatalistic 
apathy, and tried hard to soothe themselves into the 
belief that the Allies would save them, since they would 
not save themselves. For the rest they laughed hysteric- 
ally, speculated unceasingly, and talked charmingly and 
interminably. 

The only serious preparation against a renewal of the 
Red Terror in Odessa was made by ex-officers, who 
banded themselves into a semi-official corps. But 
they possessed few arms and less ammunition. Even 
the official forces of the Ukraine could place only a 
dozen small-calibre guns round Odessa, and were obliged 
to be content with one rifle between two or three men. 
In any case, the loyalty of the private soldiers in the 
small Ukrainian army was a doubtful quantity, and 
unlikely to be proof against the temptations of rich loot 
and rapine. 

Small arms were worth their weight in silver. Vladi- 
mir Franzovitch, discovering that White and I pos- 
sessed German revolvers, implored us to sell them to 
him before we left. He offered thirty pounds apiece 
for them. In Constantinople we had bought them for 
eight pounds each, and in England they would have 
cost less than forty shillings. 

Vladimir Franzovitch was weighed down by the most 
extreme pessimism over the future of Russia. 

"We cannot be a nation again for a hundred years/' 
he said. "The people are either revelling in brute- 
instinct, drunk with the strong wine of a spurious and 
half-understood idealism, or are dying in their thou- 
sands of starvation. Most of the strong men who might 
have helped to save the country have been killed, and 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 275 

the bourgeoisie folds its arms and awaits destruction in 
sheep-like inaction. " 

He saw but one hope — the Cossacks and officers who 
were rallying, through incredible hardships, to Deni- 
kin's army in the Caucasus; and Denikin could make no 
important move unless the Allies backed him with arms 
and munitions. Until this happened his small army 
would be but an oasis in the desert of hopelessness. 

We were present at several gatherings of officers, in 
Vladimir Franzovitch's room. Over bread and salted 
fish, washed down by tea, they discussed the black 
past and the blacker future. From them we heard 
awful tales of massacres and looting during the Bol- 
shevist domination over the Black Sea regions. Of 
these the most dreadful was that of the cruiser Almaz. 
There have been published many imaginative reports 
of Bolshevist massacres ; but for horror these are equalled 
by many true stories that have never been fully told, 
and never will be until the veil of isolation is lifted and 
the seeker after truth is free to gather his information at 
first-hand. 

I have every reason to believe the story of the Almaz. 
It was vouched for not only by Vladimir Franzovitch 
and other Russians whom we met in Odessa, but by 
Englishmen who were living in the city at the time, and 
are now back in England. Moreover, it is perpetuated 
in a local song similar to those of the French Revolution. 

The Bolsheviki who first occupied Odessa, in the early 
spring of 191 8, made their headquarters on the cruiser 
Almaz. Their first batch of arrests comprised about 
two hundred officers, with a few officials and other civil- 
ians. These were taken to the Almaz, and lined up on 



276 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

the deck. Each man in turn was asked: "Would you 
prefer a hot bath or a cold?" Those that chose a cold 
bath were thrown into the Black Sea, with weights tied 
to their feet. Those that said "hot" were stoked into 
the furnaces — alive. 

Later, oneMurravieff, believed to have been formerly a 
agent provocateur of the Tsarist secret police, came to Odes- 
sa as Bolsheviki commissary. He divided the city into 
four sections and the Red Guards into four parties, each 
of which was allotted its particular district for three days 
of licensed looting. The Saturnalia was due to begin in 
three days' time, when the first Austro-Hungarian de- 
tachment landed to restore order, in response to the 
Ukrainian Provisional Government's invitation. Many 
of the looters were rounded up and shot; but the Bol- 
sheviki leaders, including Murravieff and several Jews, 
escaped with millions of roubles, commandeered from 
the bank reserves. Murravieff afterward had the de- 
cency to commit suicide, but his Jewish colleagues con- 
tinued to flourish in Soviet Russia. 

Odessa had a respite from Bolshevist domination 
until the tragedy of March, 1919. Then, after a period 
of occupation by an insufficient Franco-Greek force, 
the city was evacuated in the face of an army of Soviet 
troops. Credible eye-witnesses report the massacre of 
three thousand people within a few days of, Odessa's 
recapture by the Bolsheviks. 

For all I know to the contrary, Lenine — despite the 
proved and damning evidence of past connections with 
the German Kaiser's penetration agents and the Rus- 
sian Tsar's police agents — may be an intellectual idealist 
who considers all means justifiable in establishing a 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 277 

form of communism that may eventually better the 
world. But I do know with certainty that Bolshevism, 
as practised locally in Russia by unthinking hordes who 
are not and do not pretend to be intellectual idealists, 
means universal injustice, flagrant robbery, senseless 
butchery, and a tyranny at least equal to that of Ivan 
the Terrible or any Oriental despot. All the writings 
of biased minority mongers who have confined their 
investigations to consorting with Soviet officials at Mos- 
cow and Petrograd, all the blinkered sympathy of la- 
bour agitators who devote their lives to fostering a dia- 
bolic discontent, all the chirruping of the mentally per- 
verted women and men who, at a safe distance of thou- 
sands of miles from actuality, have adopted theoretical 
Bolshevism as the latest fashion in parlour enthusiasms, 
cannot condone the fact. 

Money and life were the only cheap commodities in 
Odessa, Paper roubles of every denomination — Im- 
perial notes, Kerensky notes, Ukrainian notes, and 
Municipal notes — they were in scores and hundreds of 
thousands; and each issue was trailed by several kinds 
of forgery 3 so that only an expert could tell the true from 
the false. 

Everything^else was rare, and wildly expensive. Meat 
was ten, weak tea a hundred and ten roubles a pound. 
New suits of clothes were unobtainable at any price, 
for there was no cloth. Second-hand clothes could 
be bought in the Jewish market, where the dealers 
demanded from eight hundred roubles for a shoddy 
suit and from five hundred for an overcoat. A collar 
cost eight roubles; a handkerchief four. Other prices 
were proportionate 



278 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Seven-eighths of the factories were idle. As for the 
rich grain lands of the Ukraine, about three-quarters 
of their produce went to Austria and Germany, this be- 
ing the price paid by Skoropadsky's government for the 
policing of the Ukrainian Republic. 

The colossal price of things was due as much to Jew- 
ish speculation as to scarcity. Everything for sale 
passed through the hands of a succession of middlemen 
before it reached the public. A consignment from Aus- 
tria or Germany, or the produce of a local factory, would 
be bought by one speculator, sold to another, re-sold to 
a third, and perhaps to a fourth and a fifth. Each of the 
middlemen would allot himself a profit of from twenty 
to two hundred per cent. The same process was ap- 
plied to the boots, foodstuffs, and equipment which 
Austrian officers and soldiers stole from their military 
stores and sold to the speculators. 

All day long Franconi's and Robinart's,the two princi- 
pal cafes of Odessa, were infested by swarms of swarthy 
Jews, who wandered from table to table, selling and re- 
selling, and piling up enormous fortunes in paper rou- 
bles. And elsewhere in the city hundreds of thousands 
of Russians were in little more than rags, many thou- 
sands of them half dead from want of nourishment. 

As they passed the cafes where the Jews sat and 
haggled and made it ever more difficult for the half- 
starved masses to keep alive, the poorer Russians talked 
of pogroms. The talk culminated later, when the Ger- 
mans and Austrians had withdrawn from Odessa, in 
massacres of the less prosperous Jews, while the richer 
ones, who were the real promoters of discord, were 
warned in time and stole away with their wealth; as 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 279 

always happens when pogroms are threatened. The 
actions of the Ukrainian Jews during the Austro-Ger- 
man occupation provided a very typical instance of the 
provocative part played by the Jews of Eastern Europe. 
The Hebrew — more calculating and infinitely more 
cunning than the Slav peasant and workman — ties, 
binds, and enmeshes him in a web of usury, speculation, 
mortgage, and irksome liability; until the Slav, goaded 
beyond his powers of endurance by the men who prey 
on his instability and ignorance, rises up and seeks a 
solution in regrettable violence. 



Glorious news heartened White and myself during the 
period of waiting for the Red Cross ship to sail. Each 
morning we walked down the principal street of Odessa 
until we reached Austrian Headquarters, outside of 
which were posted the daily official and press bulletins 
written in German. I mingled with the crowd before 
the notice board while White looked in a shop window 
until I rejoined him and related the latest Allied vic- 
tory — the capture of Lille, Roubaix, Turcoing, La Bas- 
see, Ostend, or the final phases of Allenby's advance in 
Syria. With Hatton, Waite, and other Britishers we 
rejoiced greatly in private; while the German soldiers 
became glummer and glummer, and the Austrian offi- 
cers lost a portion of their corseted poise as they strut- 
ted, peacock-wise, along the boulevards. 

The Russian bourgeoisie remained apathetic as ever. 
Their main interest in the prospect of a general armistice 
seemed to be the probable effect on prices, and on the 
rouble's value, of the expected arrival of the British. 



2 8o EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

As for our Bolshevist neighbours, they continued to un- 
earth and clean their rifles and revolvers; while the corps 
of ex-officers drilled, and planned defence works outside 
Odessa. 

Under cover of dusk we slipped past the Austrian 
sentry at the dock gates on the evening before the Red 
Cross ship left for Varna, and boarded her. Louis 
Demy and Pat O'Flaherty accompanied us as far as 
the gangway. 

We remained hidden throughout the night, and only 
ventured into the open when, at ten o'clock in the 
morning, we steamed out of the wide-curved harbour 
to the open sea. 



CHAPTER XVII 

SOFIA, SALONIKA, AND SO TO BED 

Stimulated by the knowledge that Varna was occupied 
by the British we walked the decks openly, flaunting 
our protean roles of British officers, highly contented 
men, first-class passengers, and third-class scarecrows. 

Like the Batoum, the Red Cross ship brought others 
who began the voyage as semi-stowaways. Commo- 
dore Wolkenau had told us in Odessa that among our 
shipmates would be a certain General from Denikin's 
army. We found him — a tall, bearded, Grand-Duke- 
Nicholas-like man — dining in the second-class saloon, 
and wearing a suit of clothes nearly as shabby as our 
own. To dodge investigation by the Austrian port 
authorities he had assumed, with the connivance of the 
ship's captain, the character of an engineer's mate. The 
"engineer" who owned him as mate was in reality a 
commander of the Russian Imperial Navy, also at- 
tached to Denikin's forces. The pair of them were 
travelling to Salonika, as emissaries of General Deni- 
kin, to ask the Franco-British command for arms, am- 
munition, and financial support. 

Another fellow-passenger was a former lieutenant of 
the Russian navy, who, since the German occupation 
of Sevastopol, had been acting as an agent of the Allies. 
He carried a complete list of the German and Austrian 

281 



282 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

ships and submarines in the Black Sea, and details of 
the coast defences. 

The three days' voyage was uneventful. The Black 
Sea remained at its smoothest. A pleasant sun har- 
monized with the good-will and friendliness of all on 
board, and with our deep content, as we continued to 
tread on air and impatient expectation. A Bulgarian 
destroyer pranced out to meet us, and led the vessel 
through the devious minefields and into the miniature, 
toy-like harbour of Varna. The Bulgarian authorities 
imposed a four days' quarantine upon all passengers; 
but the general, the naval commander, and the Franco- 
British agent joined with us in avoiding this delay by 
sending ashore a collective note to the French naval 
officer who controlled the port. As at Odessa, we 
rowed ashore with our complete luggage wrapped in two 
newspapers, each of which contained a toothbrush, a 
revolver, some cartridges, a comb, a razor, a spare shirt, 
a spare collar, and a few handkerchiefs. 

Outside the docks a British trooper in dusty khaki, 
shoulder-badged with the name of a famous yeomanry 
regiment, passed at a gallop. The sight of him sent an 
acute thrill through me, for he was a symbol of all that 
I had missed since the day when I woke up to find my- 
self pinned beneath the wreck of an aeroplane, on a hill- 
side near Shechem. 

White looked after him, hungrily. He had been 
among the Turks for three years, and since capture 
this was his first sight of a British Tommy on duty. 

"How about it?" I asked. 

"I don't know. Somehow it makes me feel nohow in 
general, and anyhow in particular." 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 283 

We reported to the British general commanding the 
force of occupation, and gladly delivered ourselves of 
information about Odessa for the benefit of his Intel- 
ligence Officer. At the hotel occupied by the staff there 
were preliminary doubts of whether such hobo-like 
ragamuffins could be British officers; but our knowl- 
edge of army shop-talk, of the cuss words fashionable a 
year earlier, and of the chorus of "Good-bye-ee" soon 
convinced the neatly uniformed members of the mess 
that we really were lost lambs waiting to be reintro- 
duced to rations, drinks, and the field cashier. 

For many days our extravagant shabbiness stood in 
the way of a complete realization that we were no longer 
underdogs of the fortune of war, but had come back 
into our own. Bulgarian officers, their truculence in 
no way impaired by their country's downfall, wanted 
us to leave our first-class carriage on the way to Sofia. 
Outside Sofia station it was impossible to hire a cab, for 
no cabman would credit us with the price of a fare. The 
staff of the British Mission, to whom we gave reams of 
reports, tried their politest not to laugh outright at our 
clothes, but broke down before the green-and-yellow 
check waistcoat, many sizes too large, which White had 
received from a British civilian in Odessa. 

Even the real Ford car, lent us by the British Mission for 
the journey to Salonika, failed to establish a sense of dig- 
nity. Once, when we stopped on the road near a British 
column, the driver was asked who were his pals the tramps. 

We drove joyously down the Struma valley and 
through the Kreshna and Ruppel passes, still littered 
with the debris of the Bulgarian retreat. Rusted 
remnants of guns lolled on the slopes descending to the 



284 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

river. Broken carts, twisted motor-lorries, horse and 
oxen skeletons — all the flotsam of a broken army — 
mottled the roadside. In the rocky sides of the moun- 
tain passes were great clefts from which dislodged 
boulders had hurtled down on the Bulgarian columns 
when British aeroplanes helped the retreat with bomb- 
dropping. We passed through the scraggy uplands of 
Lower Macedonia, and so to Salonika. 

The real Ford car halted in the imposing grounds that 
surrounded the imposing building occupied by British 
General Headquarters at Salonika. As we climbed the 
steps leading to the front door, warmly expectant of a 
welcome by reason of our information from South Rus- 
sia, an orderly pointed out that this entrance was re- 
served for Big Noises and By-No-Means-Little Noises. 
We swerved aside, and entered an unpretentious side- 
door, labelled "Officers Only." 

" Wojer want ? " asked a Cockney Tommy, who sat at 
a desk inside it. 

"We want to report to Major Greentabs, of the In- 
telligence Department." 

The Tommy looked not -too -contemptuously at our 
sunken cheeks, our shapeless hats, our torn, creased, 
mud-spotted tatterdemalion clothes, and almost ad- 
miringly at White's check waistcoat. 

"Nah, look 'ere, civvies," he instructed, "yer speak 
English well inuf. Carncher read it ? The notice says 
'Officers Only', an' it means only officers. Dagoes 
'ave ter use the yentrance rahnd the corner, so aht yew 
go, double quick." 

That day Salonika gave itself up to revelry by reason 
of an unfounded report that an armistice had been 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 285 

signed on the Western front. One of the celebrators 
was a certain 2nd-class air mechanic of the Royal Air 
Force. We stopped him in the street, and asked the 
way to R. A. F. headquarters. Beatifically he breathed 
whiskied breath at me as he stared in unsteady surprise. 

"George," he called to his companion, "the war's 
over — hie — and here's two English blokes in civvies. 
Want to join the Royal Air Force, they do." Then, 
tapping me on the chest — "Don't you join the Royal 
Air Force. We're a rotten lot." 

Armed with signed certificates of identity we went to 
the officers' rest house to demand beds. 

"Speak English?" said a quartermaster-sergeant as 
we entered. 

"Yes." 

"Been expecting you. The Greek contractor's sons, 
aren't you?" 

Later, not long before the bulletin-board showed the 
rumoured armistice with Germany to be premature, an 
orderly in the rest house wished to share the great news 
that wasn't true with the nearest person, who hap- 
pened to be White. He stopped short on seeing a dubi- 
ous civilian. But his good-fellowship was not to be 
denied. French being the lingua franca of the multi- 
nationalitied troops in Salonika, he slapped White on 
the back and announced: "Matey, la guerre estfinie/" 

Metamorphosed by ordnance uniforms from third- 
class scarecrows to the regulation pattern of officer, we 
spent glorious days of rest and recuperation. Then, by 
the next boat for Port Said, we left Salonika the squalid 
for Cairo the comfortable; and so to the world where they 
dined, danced, demobilized, and signed treaties of peace. 



EPILOGUE 

A DAMASCUS POSTSCRIPT; AND SOME WORDS ON THE 

KNIGHTS OF ARABY, A CRUSADER IN SHORTS, A VERY 

NOBLE LADYE AND SOME HAPPY ENDINGS 

Of all the cities in the Near and Middle East Damascus 
is at once the most ancient, the most unchanged by 
time, the most unreservedly Oriental, and the most 
elusive. 

Constantinople is Byzantium — cum Mohammedan 
lust for power — cum Ottoman domination — cum Lev- 
antine materialism — cum European exploitation and 
Bourse transactions, in a setting of natural and archi- 
tural magnificence; a city that expresses itself variously 
and inharmoniously by a blendless chorus from an un- 
mixable mixture of creeds and races; a charming, femi- 
nine city with a wayward soul; a cruel, unstable city 
of gamblers; a city of pleasant, vine-trellised alley- 
ways, delightful waterways, fear-haunted prisons and 
extravagant rogueries; to my mind the most intriguing 
city in the world. 

Cairo is a compound of sphinx-and-pyramid an- 
tiquity, modern opulence, degenerate Arab touts, Arab 
Babudom, reserved and Simla-like officialdom, the cos- 
mopolitan gaiety of four great hotels, sordid and curious 
vice, sand-fringed suburbs, traffic in tourists and fake 
scarabs, and the compelling, changeless charm of the Nile. 

286 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 287 

Alexandria is bastard Byzantine-Levantine, with a 
wonderful past, an insistent Cotton Exchange, a lovely 
harbour, a crooked racecourse where crooked races are 
run, and a summer colony for Cairo's white-ducked 
Westerns. 

Port Said is a dull, heat-heavy hell, at which the 
traffic to the Far East calls of unwelcome necessity, 
pays its tolls, skirts the green-gray statue of De Lesseps, 
and gladly glides down the turquoise-toned Suez Canal. 

Suez is a hard-faced ex-courtesan, formerly famed for 
outrageous spectacles, but now converted by that mis- 
sionary of war-time expedience the British Provost- 
Marshal into an unreal, uninviting, hypocritical re- 
spectability; a harbour landlady for squat-sailed, danc- 
ing dhows. 

Mecca is the pilgrim city in excelsis, with a Holy 
Stone, overpowering heat, much colour and squalor, a 
reputation for impenetrability, and no traditions earlier 
than the birth of the Prophet. 

Jerusalem has a stupendous history and is yet the 
most disappointing city in the world; a small, gilded- 
gingerbread city with no beautiful building except the 
blue-tiled Mosque of Omar, no first-class view except 
that of the walls and roof-tops from the Mount of 
Olives; a city trading its past for Western charity; a 
city with a rebuilt Tower of David masquerading as the 
original, a probably authentic relic in the Tomb of 
Absalom, and many dubious ones where, within the 
space of fifty square yards of beflagged church-floor, 
mumbling guides point out to pilgrims in pince-nez the 
supposed tombs of Jesus of Nazareth, Joseph of Ari- 
mathea, and Nicodemus, hard by the supposed site of 



288 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Calvary, strewn with supposed fragments of the Cross; 
a city sacred to three great religions, exemplified lo- 
cally by scheming town-Arabs; ring-curled, lethargic 
Jews aloof from their Western kindred; and swarthy, 
lethargic Christians educated and largely supported by 
Euro-American subsidies; a city of narrow, denomina- 
tional schools that ignore the Fellowship of Man; a city 
whose Church of the Holy Sepulchre should be an epi- 
tome of peace and good-will, but yet is a place where, 
in the name of Christian charity, Catholic, Orthodox, 
Coptic, Armenian, and various kinds of Protestant 
priests intrigue and squabble over claims to guard rel- 
ics, windows, and corners, and defray the cost of holy 
candle-light by collecting from visitors enough money 
to burn a hundred and one candles for one and a hun- 
dred years; a city better read about than examined. 

Bagdad is a city with a romantic name, some fine 
Arabian architecture, and an impressive western gate 
whence the Damascus-bound caravans move dustily 
across the desert; a city fallen from greatness to the date 
and grain trade, minor bazaars, and the steamer and 
dhow traffic of the broad-bosomed Tigris; a city redo- 
lent of all that Haroun-al-Raschid was and modern 
Mesopotamia's opportunist sheikhs emphatically are 
not; a city with a prosperous future, thanks to the Brit- 
ish engineers who have irrigated the Tigris-Euphrates 
basin into the way it should go. 

Mosul is an unlovely mud city that straggles around 
the ruins of Nineveh the Magnificent. 

But Damascus is indescribably a city with an un- 
fathomable soul. In its complex ancestry are the 
strains of many ancient civilizations. The crooked 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 289 

alleys and decrepit buildings of its oldest quarter, 
perched on a mountain projection high above Damas- 
cus proper, have an origin lost in the conjectural mists 
of an epoch when the written word was not. Another 
part of it was co-incident with Baalbek and sun-wor- 
ship. The plain facade of many a house (purposely 
plain to divert the cupidity of Turkish pashas) hides a 
wide, white courtyard soothed by fountains, the plash- 
ing of which is coolingly heard in divanned rooms pre- 
cious with rugs and hangings, and ornamented by mi- 
nutely detailed designs in fancy arches and miniature 
cupolas — houses exactly as they were when tenanted 
by rich merchants who flourished under the greater 
Arabian caliphs. The Street called Straight, the glass- 
roofed, unique bazaar and a dozen other city-marks are 
bafflingly suggestive of contact with a dozen periods of 
greatness. And last year, when the demoralized Turks 
marched out of the city under the Arab flag that flew 
defiantly from the city gate, Arab thinkers began to 
dream of yet another period of greatness, in which Da- 
mascus was to be the centre of a re-united Arabian 
Empire. . . . 

My motive in returning to Damascus was threefold — 
certain minor work at Air Force Headquarters, an un- 
praiseworthy resolve to buy carpets and knick-knacks 
before other officers of the Palestine Army chose their 
pickings from the merchants' war hoards, and a sneak- 
ingly benevolent desire to see George, the mongrel 
interpreter who had been bullied into betraying my 
escape plans in Baranki Barracks, but who was yet 
such a pathetic little nondescript. 



290 EASTERN NIGHTS-AND FLIGHTS 

With a passenger I left Ramleh aerodrome in a Bris- 
tol Fighter; for with an aeroplane available who would 
think of travelling by train or automobile over the dis- 
ordered rails and roads of Syria? It was a sun-shim- 
mery day, pleasantly cool in the early part of a Pales- 
tine November. Everything suggested peace as we 
flew northeastward — the calm cloudlessness, the silent, 
sparkling countryside, the rhythmic purring of the mo- 
tor. The ground mosaic was radiant with that acute 
clearness which makes flying so much more interesting 
in the East and Middle East than elsewhere. 

Far away to the right we could see from our height of 
6,000 feet the ghostlike outline of the Dead Sea behind 
the bleak-ridged hills beyond Jericho. To the left were 
the shining sea, white-roofed Jaffa, and the lines of sand 
dunes that curved in and out of the coloured country- 
side. Ahead and around were brown surfaces of grain 
land and green blotches of woodland, interspaced with 
gray-gleaming villages. 

Soon the Bristol Fighter droned over what had been 
the old front of Allenby's left flank, with uneven 
trenches snaking southeastward from the sand-bordered 
coast to the Jordan basin. The Jordan itself twisted 
and writhed through its green-and-gold valley, over 
which occasional trenchworks zigzagged. Then came 
the hill desolation of Lower Samaria. Near Shechem 
I reached out a fur-gloved hand and showed my pas- 
senger the approximate spot where, seven months 
earlier, I was shot down and awoke to find Arab no- 
mads approaching my wrecked machine. Slightly to 
the west was Nazareth, perched pleasingly on high 
ground. 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 291 

The pear-shaped Sea of Galilee flickered with irides- 
cent twinkling in the sunlight. Just north of where the 
river flows into the lake I picked out the point at which 
a regiment of the Australian Light Horse, confronted 
on the far bank by a Turco-German force sent from 
Damascus to defend the ford, swam their horses across 
the Jordan and routed the enemy. 

The patchwork flatness below changed to more plains 
of gray-brown grain-country and gray-green orchard 
land neighboured on the east by the desert that was a 
populous province in the days when armies of age-old 
civilizations — Assyrian, Babylonian, Medean, Persian, 
Macedonian, and Arabian — swept backward and for- 
ward in waves of conquest and counter-conquest, to and 
from Nineveh, Babylon, Ctesiphon, and Old Bagdad, 
until the Turkish hordes swarmed across from Central 
Asia and ruined all the lands they conquered. 

Small and indistinct at first, then expanding into a 
vivid clearness as we flew toward it, Damascus came 
into sight; and of all the views from the air that I re- 
member from flights in Palestine, Egypt, Syria, France, 
Italy, Bulgaria, Greece, England, and America, this was 
incomparably the loveliest. 

Far away to the west was Mount Lebanon, and from 
it stretched a line of mountains, growing ever bleaker 
as they neared the Syrian Desert. The low ground 
dominated by the heights was a maze of forests, wheat- 
fields, pasturage, and orchard land, intermingled with 
patches of sand. Straight ahead was the ancient city 
of Damascus, a straggling surface of white roofs pierced 
by the domes and minarets of many mosques, all in a 
gray whiteness, as if powdered with the dust of its four 



292 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

thousand years of history. Pharpar and Abana, the 
twin rivers of Damascus, showed up plainly as, con- 
verging and diverging, they descended from their 
sources on the rim of the mountain, and lost themselves 
in the jig-saw of crooked streets and square-topped 
houses. The background is the wide, shimmering des- 
ert that loses itself on the eastern horizon. 

Having, to the roaring accompaniment of a 191 8 
Hispano-Suiza aero-engine, circled over this city half 
as old as time, I spiralled down and landed on the aero- 
drome. 

On horses borrowed from the Sikhs who guarded the 
aerodrome we cantered towards the city, three miles 
distant. The road was utterly vile, for apart from 
Turkish neglect it had for three years been dented and 
spoiled by German motor lorries. Every few yards 
we had to edge our horses round some large hole. 

Inside Damascus long-disused tram-lines rose high 
above the roadway. Through the narrow, winding 
streets there streamed a medley of camels, horses, fat 
men riding on thin donkeys, goats, rainbow-robed Bed- 
ouins, veiled women in black, and fezzed Syrians and 
Armenians. All of them — camels, donkeys, horses, and 
humans — wound in and around each other without any 
pretence at order. 

Under such conditions the least mishap is enough to 
bring about a block in the haphazard traffic. We were 
held up for nearly twenty minutes when a donkey, with 
a huge load of wood straddled on its back, lay down 
near a hole in the road, and refused to budge. Men, 
women, and animals mingled confusedly, and exhorta- 
tion and imprecations were flung at the donkey and its 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 293 

master. The onlookers were raining advice as we 
halted our horses on the rim of the crowd, but none 
made an attempt to help. And the following is an 
approximate but far from literal translation of a few 
remarks: 

"O thou unfortunate one! He has a donkey with a 
stubborn spirit. It has deposited itself on the ground 
and most annoyingly refuses to rise." 

" Beat it hard, I say ! I have a string of camels which 
become unruly because they cannot proceed. Beat it, 
I say!" 

"Nay, rather speak kindly and apply gentle pressure 
to the under-parts. Then will it lift its forefeet and 
Stand erect. Stubborn donkeys care naught for blows." 

"Cow-faced son of an exceedingly fat she-dog! Dis- 
place thy heavy hoof from my astonishingly painful 
toes!" 

"Ah-ee! Ah-ee! But a moment hence I had a 
money-purse, and it has left me." 

"O thou unfortunate one! He had a money-purse, 
and it has left him. O thou unfortunate one ! " 

And although all knew that the purse was probably 
hidden in the folds of some Arab's robe, those near the 
unfortunate one searched and scratched the ground, 
probably none more assiduously than the man who 
could have produced it. 

Now if the period had been two months earlier a 
Turkish gendarme would have taken the donkey-owner 
apart, and, if he failed to offer a bribe, shot his prostrate 
beast and hauled its carcase to the roadside. As likely 
as not it would have been the gendarme who stole the 
unfortunate one's money. 



294 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

What actually happened was this. A sun-browned 
man in light khaki tunic, short trousers, and bare knees 
sauntered along, a cigarette drooping from the left- 
hand corner of his mouth. 

"Saa-eeda> Tommy Effendi," said one of the loiterers, 
making way for him. 

"Damned old fool of a moke," said the man in shorts; 
then bent down and alternately stroked, pushed, and 
spoke to the donkey. Somehow he persuaded it to rise 
and start walking. The crowd disentangled itself and 
its animals from each other, and dispersed. And the 
man in shorts, his cigarette still dangling from the left- 
hand corner of his mouth, passed on, as casual and un- 
surprised as if he had been in Brixton or Birmingham. 

Both in appearance and in spirit Damascus had 
changed much since the days of my captivity. Desti- 
tution was yet evident, but far less flagrantly than when 
I had seen starving babies lying against the walls and 
crying their hunger. There were no more furtive looks, 
and many more smiles. The swaggering Germans were 
supplanted by companionable Tommies, the tyrannous 
Turkish gendarmes by the headdressed Arab police. 
In the long, arcaded bazaar the traders had brought out 
their stocks of carpets, prayer-rugs, silks, and precious 
stones, hoarded during the war, and were selling them 
at prices far below those ruling in war-time Cairo or 
war-time anywhere else. And everywhere the Arabian 
flag was prominent. 

For many a day the talk in the bazaars had been of a 
new Arabian Empire, as a reward for the exploits of 
King Hussein's Arabs — exploits that had not only freed 
Arabia and helped to free Syria, but had involved the 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 295 

abolition of all blood-feuds in a thousand miles of semi- 
lawless country. The Emir Feisul, son of King Hussein 
(and thus a direct descendant of the Prophet), was on 
his way to the Peace Conference in Paris, accompanied 
by Colonel Lawrence, the young Englishman who was 
the soul of the Arab national revival, and of the Arabs' 
epic campaigns between Mecca and Damascus. And 
many citizens of Damascus were hoping that he would 
return with the realization of their dreams that the city 
was to be the centre of pan-Arabian greatness. 



My enquiries at Baranki Barracks, and in the offices 
of the British Provost-Marshal and the Arab gendar- 
merie, failed to trace the fate of George; and I had to 
be content with the memory of a futile little figure 
standing on the steps of our railway carriage, on the 
morning after our betrayal, and saying, with despair in 
his voice : " I have so little courage. I ask pardon." 

Of the other intimate characters in the story I can 
account for all but two. Jean Willi, the Israelite drago- 
man who was my benefactor at Nazareth, has not yet 
given me the chance to pay back in part the good deeds 
that I owe him; but I still have hopes. And I can only 
guess at what has happened to Michael Ivanovitch 
Titoff, now somewhere behind the screen which, since 
the Bolshevist reoccupation of last spring, separates 
Odessa from the normal world. From what I know of 
his character I am certain that when the Soviet troops 
arrived he proclaimed himself a Bolshevist, and took full 
advantage of the conditions whereby the unrighteous 
have special opportunity to flourish. 



296 EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 

Vladimir Franzovitch — a Russian as estimable as 
Michael Ivanovitch was despicable — died for the coun- 
try he loved and despaired of, fighting in Denikin's 
army. 

For the rest, I can offer happy endings as convention- 
ally apposite as those of the worst "best-seller" of any 
lady novelist. 

Miss Whittaker, the noble girl who played in Con- 
stantinople the heroic part of an Edith Cavell, is now 
Lady Paul. Less than a month ago an American war- 
ship took her from Constantinople to Beyrout, where 
she married Captain Sir Robert Paul, one of the Brit- 
ish officers whom she had helped to escape. She now 
lives in Aleppo, where Paul commands the Arab gen- 
darmerie. In this crowded narrative I have failed to do 
justice to the brave and gifted woman who many times 
risked liberty and life in aiding unfortunate country- 
men; but only because the last thing she would desire is 
advertisement have I refrained from writing the eulogy 
she deserves. 

Another happy ending, almost too good to be true, 
was the recent wedding of Colonel Newcombe and Mile. 
"X", the girl who arranged his escape from Broussa 
and concealed him in Constantinople while he worked 
for a withdrawal of Turkey from the war. 

Mr. S., the British merchant who jeopardized his 
neck in helping no less than seven British officers to 
liberty, has returned to England, and should be con- 
scious of much merit. 

The Turkish armistice happened a few days before 
Theodore was to have been hanged. Fulton and Stone 
were released from the Ministry of War Prison, and 



EASTERN NIGHTS— AND FLIGHTS 297 

twenty-four hours later, by means of threats, they ob- 
tained reprieve and freedom for the Greek waiter who 
had hidden them. He was then half dead, as a result 
of insufficient food, and of the dreadful, disease-ridden, 
insanitary, crowded state of his dungeon; but he re- 
covered under careful nursing, and returned to his 
mother and sisters, in the house where the gendarmes 
had captured Yeats-Brown, Fulton, and Stone. 

The Maritza restaurant, near Stamboul station, still 
flourishes; but Theodore is no longer there. With the 
money gained by acting as conspirator-in-chief for 
British prisoners, he talks of coming to London and 
opening a small restaurant of his own. If this happens, 
he can count on regular customers from among those 
who saw him, with his bent shoulders and blue-glassed 
spectacles, flicking a secret letter on to the tablecloth, 
under cover of a menu-card. 

Those of us who schemed, escaped, hoped, feared, 
wore disguises and whiskers, assumed illnesses and in- 
sanities, suffered, and amused ourselves generally are 
dispersed over five continents. Fulton and Stone are 
still in Constantinople, but as responsible officials in- 
stead of under-dogs of war. White is a quiet-living 
manufacturer in Melbourne. Hill and Jones, the mad- 
men of Yozgad, Haidar Pasha, and Gumuch Souyou 
have gone their demobilized ways in sanity and content, 
one to Sydney, the other to Glasgow. Paul is in Syria, 
Colonel Newcombe in Egypt. Yeats-Brown, ex-Mile. 
Josephine Albert, is in London, with an eyeglass which 
he kept intact through three years of adventurous cap- 
tivity, from the day when he was taken prisoner near 
Bagdad to the day when, from the verandah of his 



2 9 8 EASTERN NIGHTS-AND FLIGHTS 

hiding-place opposite the deserted British Embassy in 
Constantinople, he looked along the Grande Rue de 
Pera and learned, from the fluttering Allied flags, that 
the Turkish armistice had been signed. Last and least, 
I am now in civilian blessedness and America. 

Often I have left the satisfying solidity of London, 
the restful beauty of a Thames backwater, the com- 
forting hospitality of New York, the wealth-conscious 
heartiness of Chicago, to hear the chanted summons to 
prayer from the minaret that faced my prison in Damas- 
cus, watched the intrigues that coloured Constantinople 
during the twilight of the Turkish Empire, discuss Bol- 
shevism and the price of revolvers with Vladimir Fran- 
zovitch, as he sits on a camp bed in his tiny room at 
Odessa. 

And Time, the greatest of romantics, has nearly per- 
suaded me to disregard memory and believe that I 
enjoyed it all. 



THE END 




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